Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 22
May 26, 2017
An Invitation to Read The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery
I’m planning to reread L.M. Montgomery’s 1926 novel The Blue Castle this fall. Would anyone like to join me? When my friend Naomi (Consumed By Ink) and I reached the end of Montgomery’s “Emily” series last month, we started talking about what to read next, and we’ve decided on this novel, partly because Montgomery started writing it just after she finished Emily Climbs and before she began to work on Emily’s Quest. We also decided to announce it now, instead of waiting until fall, so anyone who’s interested will have plenty of time to get a copy of the book and start reading.
I’m intrigued by Mary Henley Rubio’s suggestion that “Tucking The Blue Castle in before the third Emily book, Montgomery blows off the steam that had been gathering as she faced the unhappy prospect of marrying off Emily. The Blue Castle becomes part of the Emily series…” (“Subverting the Trite: L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Room of Her Own,’” in The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume Two, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre).
Naomi and I are planning to write blog posts about The Blue Castle sometime in November. Please join us by commenting, talking about the novel on Twitter—hashtag #ReadingValancy (inspired by #ReadingEmily, which Naomi chose for the Emily Readalong)—and/or by writing a blog post of your own. If you write a blog post, we hope you’ll share the link in the comments on Naomi’s blog or mine, or both, so we can keep track.
I suggested November because of this passage from The Blue Castle:
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?”
It isn’t likely that I’ll have photos of the Muskoka landscape in the fall to include in my blog post on The Blue Castle, as I don’t have plans in the coming months to visit Bala, Ontario (the town that inspired the fictional “Deerwood” in the novel). I don’t have cats, either, so there will be no cat photos for this readalong, at least on my blog. However, today I can share with you some photos of PEI in the spring, because I spent some time on the Island last weekend. And, like many Montgomery fans, I have a couple of small china dogs, Gog and Magog, so a photo of them on the mantel is the best I can offer as a substitute for cat photos. When I was in Charlottetown, I bought a copy of L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys, a collection of essays on Montgomery and Ontario, which I’ve been meaning to read ever since it came out two years ago. I’m especially interested in the essays on The Blue Castle, by Laura M. Robinson, E. Holly Pike, and Linda Rodenburg.
If you’d like to read The Blue Castle with Naomi and me, please let us know by commenting on this blog post.
If you’re interested in Montgomery’s life, particularly her ambitions as a very young writer, you might like to read what Naomi wrote earlier this week about Melanie J. Fishbane’s new novel, Maud.
Here are the three posts I wrote for the Emily Readalong earlier this year, in case you missed them:
“I am important to myself”: Emily of New Moon
“I have to write”: Emily Climbs
“She knew that a hard struggle was before her”: Emily’s Quest
My other posts on L.M. Montgomery are included here: “L.M. Montgomery in Nova Scotia.”
And, finally, here are the photos I took in PEI on the Victoria Day weekend.
Charlottetown:
Confederation Trail, St. Peter’s:
Prince Edward Island National Park, Greenwich:
Confederation Bridge:
(I’m always drawn to the simplicity of bridge, sea, and sky, and I’ve taken several versions of this photo over the years. There’s one in last year’s blog post “Spring in Rainbow Valley” and another in 2015’s “Birthday ‘Coincidences’ in Emma and Anne of Green Gables.’”)
May 5, 2017
Why Did Jane Austen Abandon The Watsons?
It’s a pleasure to introduce this guest post by Kathleen A. Flynn on Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons. Kathleen’s debut novel, The Jane Austen Project, which Syrie James calls “clever, captivating, and original,” was published earlier this week. I loved the book and I agree with Paula Byrne that it’s “Brilliantly written and a must-read for any Jane Austen fan!”
Thank you to Harper Collins for sending me an ARC, which I read last month on a weekend trip to Prince Edward Island. Regular readers of this blog will know I often read books by or about L.M. Montgomery when I visit PEI. This time, I enjoyed reading one of my old favourites, Emily’s Quest, and discovering a new favourite in The Jane Austen Project. Over the past few months, during my rereading of the “Emily” novels, I’ve been thinking a great deal about the pressure Montgomery felt when she was writing the second and third novels in that series, pressure to provide her readers with the courtship plot they expected.
It was a delight to find the heroine of The Jane Austen Project, Rachel Katzman, addressing this topic in relation to Jane Austen’s life and work: “Many people find it strange, even tragic, that the author of such emotionally satisfying love stories apparently never found love herself, but I don’t,” Rachel thinks, just after she meets Jane Austen.
In Rachel’s opinion, Austen “was a genius: burning with the desire to create undying works of art, not a cozy home for a husband and children.” She “wrote the world she knew, and what she felt would appeal to readers. The marriage plot is interesting mostly for how it illuminates the hearts of her characters, what they learn about themselves on the way to the altar. She concerns herself with bigger questions: how to distinguish good people from plausible fakes; what a moral life demands of us; the problem of how to be an intelligent woman in a world that had no real use for them.” I underlined many other passages I thought were excellent, and I’m tempted to quote at length, but I’ll stop there and urge you to get a copy of this fabulous novel so you can read it yourself. (First, though, I hope you’ll read Kathleen’s guest post, below.)
Kathleen is a copy editor at The New York Times, and a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. She lives in Brooklyn. I’ve been following her on Twitter for a long time and I enjoy reading her blog. (You can also find her on Facebook.) I’m very happy that she’s celebrating her publication week by sharing some of her thoughts on Jane Austen’s writing process. Congratulations on the publication of The Jane Austen Project, Kathleen!
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Kathleen Flynn (photo by Bryan Thomas)
Here’s the description of the novel:
London, 1815: Two travelers—Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane—arrive in a field in rural England, disheveled and weighed down with hidden money. Turned away at a nearby inn, they are forced to travel by coach all night to London. They are not what they seem, but rather colleagues who have come back in time from a technologically advanced future, posing as wealthy West Indies planters—a doctor and his spinster sister. While Rachel and Liam aren’t the first team from the future to “go back,” their mission is by far the most audacious: meet, befriend, and steal from Jane Austen herself.
Carefully selected and rigorously trained by The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, disaster-relief doctor Rachel and actor-turned-scholar Liam have little in common besides the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in. Circumstances that call for Rachel to stifle her independent nature and let Liam take the lead as they infiltrate Austen’s circle via her favorite brother, Henry.
But diagnosing Jane’s fatal illness and obtaining an unpublished novel hinted at in her letters pose enough of a challenge without the continuous convolutions of living a lie. While her friendship with Jane deepens and her relationship with Liam grows complicated, Rachel fights to reconcile the woman she is with the proper lady nineteenth-century society expects her to be. As their portal to the future prepares to close, Rachel and Liam struggle with their directive to leave history intact and exactly as they found it . . . however heartbreaking that may prove.
And here’s Kathleen’s guest post on The Watsons:
It often seems like writing was easy for Jane Austen. There is the crazy brio of her juvenilia; early versions of three of her novels by her mid-20s; the subtle, complicated Emma completed in just one year. Seeing her letters in an exhibit at the Morgan Library a few years ago, I was amazed by the quicksilver flow of her thoughts, the perfection of her handwriting.
But things did not always go so well, as we see with The Watsons.
This incomplete novel, dating from her years in Bath (1801-1805) shares elements with the completed ones: keen insight into gradations of status, an interest in gossip, a scene set at a dance, a family heavy on sisters, a young woman seemingly destined to find a husband before the story closes. We are introduced, using dialogue more than exposition, to not just “three or four families in a country village,” but to an entire social world.
We learn that Emma Watson, raised by her loving aunt and uncle in comfort and the expectation of a tidy fortune, has been cast off after the uncle died and the aunt remarried unwisely. She’s returned to a family she barely knows and with scant means to support her, with manners that strike her older sister Elizabeth, who is kind but crass, as too “refined” for her setting.
It’s a bit gloomy, but there is also a lot of Austen’s comedy here as she explores her characters’ blind spots and snobbery. The opening does not seem so much bleaker than that of Sense and Sensibility. It’s a fascinating start, with so much going on, and so much promise. Whenever I read it, I am saddened by its incompleteness, and tormented by two questions. Why did she stop at around 18,000 words? And why did she keep the manuscript around anyway?
Did she feel there was a flaw in her plot? We know at least that Austen knew where the story was going, for family lore holds that she’d told Cassandra what would happen.
James Heldman, in an article in Persuasions in 1986, argued that the narrative approach in The Watsons is different – that there is less distance between the heroine and the narrator than usual, and it lacks the usual “narrative voice of Jane Austen telling us the story, informing us, guiding us, shaping our responses, standing between us and her characters as we together watch them live their lives.” He goes on to theorize that Emma Watson’s sense of displacement in her new home may be read as a dramatic rendering of the author’s own sense of unease in Bath.
Conventional wisdom is that Jane Austen was unhappy there. Her letters offer little guidance, unless absence is itself a clue. None survive between 27 May 1801 – after a flurry of them at the beginning of that year to Cassandra about minutiae of settling into their new home – and 14 September 1804. The 27 May letter, which anticipates that the sisters will soon be together again, concludes with this unintentionally poignant comment: “Unless anything particular occurs, I shall not write again.”
Perhaps something about how she lived there made fiction hard. Could she have lacked privacy, a suitable spot to work, or the ability to command her time enough to establish a routine? It seems ridiculous that someone so brilliant could be discouraged, yet something was holding her back. We must remember too, she was not yet a published author, even if the sale in 1803 of Susan (later Northanger Abbey) made her think she would be soon. Perhaps her writing did not seem sufficiently important to her family, or even to herself.
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Kathleen’s photo of a street in Bath. She remarks that “it’s a little claustrophobic and maybe it captures how Jane Austen might have felt living there.”
Or perhaps, contrary to the widely held view, she was enjoying Bath. Maybe instead of writing she was busy socializing, observing people and their quirks, storing up memories that would later be repurposed into fiction. I would prefer to believe this – it’s painful to imagine Jane Austen being miserable.
But as she neared 30, late in her time in Bath, we can guess she was at least sad, if not deeply depressed. She endured two punishing losses in quick order: the death of her friend Madame Lefroy, and that of her father, which was not only a personal blow but also a practical one, leaving her mother, her sister and herself in a precarious financial state and for several years without a settled home.
In The Watsons, Emma Watson’s father, a retired clergyman, is in poor health. Family tradition holds that Jane told Cassandra that he would die in the course of the story, forcing Emma to move in with her annoying brother.
Maybe creating a kind, dying, retired-clergyman father and then having her own kind, retired-clergyman father die was a little too much reality for Jane Austen. Many writers of fiction have at one time or another had the eerie sense of their own life starting to mirror what they’ve been writing about. It isn’t that they can see into the future or that by writing things they cause them to happen, though it can feel this way. It’s more that themes and preoccupations work their way to the surface, as possible future events are rehearsed in the imagination. Writing can be an escape from the limits of one’s own personal circumstances, but at the same time is tangled in them, however indirectly this may show up in the stories that emerge.
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Kathleen’s photo of Chawton Cottage, where “maybe there is more of a mood of openness and freedom.”
The move to Chawton in 1809 began an amazingly fertile period in Austen’s writing life – impressive by any measure, but especially in contrast with the years that preceded it, lending support to the theory that it was something about her way of life that had been the problem. She revised three of her existing novels, wrote three new ones, and started a fourth before being forced by illness to abandon it in early 1817. But she seems to have left The Watsons alone.
Did she think she might ever pick it up again and rework it? Or did she keep it around as reference source, to mine for ideas and phrases? Could it have come to seem too old-fashioned? Too dark? Though death is a plot device in Austen’s novels, like that of Mr. Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, or Mrs. Churchill in Emma, it is never of characters we’ve come to know and care about. Maybe she realized killing Mr. Watson was a step she wasn’t prepared to take, that this was not the sort of writer she wanted to be. (“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,” Mansfield Park, Volume 3, Chapter 17.) Seen that way, it is maybe not so much a false start as a learning experience, not a waste of time but a way station on her road to greatness.
Still, how I wish she had finished it.
Do you have a theory about why Jane Austen abandoned The Watsons? Add a comment below.
April 21, 2017
“She knew that a hard struggle was before her”: Emily’s Quest
At the beginning of L.M. Montgomery’s Emily’s Quest (1927), Emily Starr has “very clear-cut ideas of what she was going to make of herself.” Committed to living in and writing about Prince Edward Island instead of New York, she is “filled with youth’s joy in mere existence” and determined to succeed as a writer. She anticipates that a “hard struggle” lies ahead: there will be neighbours and relatives who’ll judge the way she spends her time, rejection letters from publishers, days when she’ll feel unable to reach the standards she’s set for her work (Chapter 1).
For all her talents at a kind of “second sight” (Chapter 11), however, she can’t predict the full extent of the challenges. And even though the book begins with her spirited resistance to rewriting her stories to please magazine publishers—“After this I’m just going to write what I want to,” she declares in her diary (Chapter 2)—she still has to endure criticism from Dean Priest, a long period during which she doesn’t write at all, and many days and months of feeling she can hardly muster the courage to live through tomorrow, let alone the years ahead. Dean speaks of her writing as an amusement, a “little hobby,” saying, “I’d hate to have you dream of being a Brontë or an Austen—and wake to find you’d wasted your youth on a dream” (Chapter 4). And then she gives up on writing altogether.
It’s hard to listen to Emily of New Moon, who used to say things like, “I am important to myself” and “I have to write,” dismissing her writing: “Oh, I’m done with that. I seem to have no interest in it since my illness. I saw—then—how little it really mattered—how many more important things there were—” (Chapter 8).
She’s engaged to the wrong man, and as Elizabeth Waterston says in Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery, “The artist as a young person seems to have disappeared from the story, just as, long ago, in Anne of Green Gables, the story of Anne’s literary ambitions veered away into the traditional path of a courtship tale.” Cecily Devereux writes that “without home and children, as Janet Royal makes clear to Emily, and as Anne comes to see early in her story, success for women is seen to be a hollow thing” (“Writing with a ‘Definite Purpose’: L.M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung and the Politics of Imperial Motherhood in Fiction for Children,” in The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume Two: A Critical Heritage, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre).
After Emily breaks the engagement, she returns to her writing: “Suddenly—the flash came—again—after these long months of absence…. And all at once I knew I could write” (Chapter 12)—and yet the courtship plot has not disappeared. In one chapter, she’s quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning and praying, “Oh, God, as long as I live give me ‘leave to work.’ … Leave and courage” (Chapter 12). And then in the very next one, she’s ready to set aside that work for domestic happiness: “Who cared for laurel, after all? Orange blossoms would make a sweeter coronet” (Chapter 13).
Mary Rubio says that “It was painful for Montgomery to make her feisty little alter-ego into a creature of bland domesticity,” and it was “little wonder” that she found it hard to complete the last “Emily” book. Rubio notes that “On June 30, 1926, she wrote grimly: ‘I began work—again—on Emily III. I wonder if I shall ever get that book done!’ On October 13, 1926, she breathed a sigh of relief: ‘Yesterday morning I actually finished writing Emily’s Quest. Of course I have to revise it yet but it is such a relief to feel it off my mind at last. I’ve never had such a time writing a book. Thank heaven it is the last of the Emily series’” (“Subverting the Trite: L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Room of Her Own,’” in The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume Two).
I was interested to learn that after she completed Emily Climbs, Montgomery postponed writing the inevitable sequel and instead began to write The Blue Castle. “This was unprecedented,” Rubio says in her biography of Montgomery, “having two novels going at the same time.” It sounds as if she was very reluctant to commit to an ending for Emily’s story and write it down. Emily’s marriage, Rubio writes, “was the foregone conclusion, demanded by the genre and the era” (Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings).
I read Jane Urquhart’s L.M. Montgomery (from the Extraordinary Canadians series) last month and I was intrigued by a question posed by a friend of hers: “my friend insists that Montgomery was holding back, that had she given herself permission to do so she could have written adult fiction as compelling as that of Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot—both of whom, Montgomery confesses in her diaries, she ‘may have dreamed of rivaling’ in her ‘salad days’—or of her American contemporaries Edith Wharton or Willa Cather. But how would such cerebral and possibly sexual drama be received in the conservative Protestant society Montgomery lived in and wrote about?”
What would the “Emily” series have been like, I wonder, if Montgomery had followed the very advice Emily gives herself at the beginning of Emily’s Quest, “to write what I want to”—if she hadn’t written the ending her readers expected?
This blog post is the third and last in a series for the Emily Readalong (#ReadingEmily) hosted by Naomi of Consumed by Ink (for more about the readalong and links to what others have written for their blogs, see her posts “Emily Readalong: Emily of New Moon,” “Emily Readalong: Emily Climbs,” and “Emily Readalong: Emily’s Quest”). My first two posts in the series: “‘I am important to myself’: Emily of New Moon” and “‘I have to write’: Emily Climbs.”
I spent the Easter weekend in Prince Edward Island, and I have a few photos to share with you.
New London on Saturday evening:
New Glasgow on Sunday afternoon:
Cavendish Cemetery, “Resting Place of L.M. Montgomery”:
L.M. Montgomery’s grave:
Graves of L.M. Montgomery’s mother, Clara Woolner MacNeill, and grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Woolner MacNeill:
L.M. Montgomery’s Birthplace, New London (the museum opens for the season in May):
Oceanview Lookoff, Cavendish, Prince Edward Island National Park:
It was grey and foggy most of the time we were there, perfect weather for reading at the cottage where we were staying, or in a café. I was #ReadingEmily, of course, plus Kathleen A. Flynn’s fabulous new novel The Jane Austen Project, and listening to Pride and Prejudice and then Budge Wilson’s Before Green Gables while driving. I’m looking forward to visiting PEI again later in the spring or maybe in the summer. The weather on the weekend reminded me of a line from Anne of Green Gables about “the beautiful capricious, reluctant Canadian spring” (Chapter 20). Like Montgomery, Budge Wilson often describes what spring is like in the Maritimes. In her story “Be-ers and Doers,” the narrator talks about the South Shore of Nova Scotia: “all those granite rocks and fogs and screeching gulls, the slow, labouring springs, and the quick, grudging summers. And then the winters—greyer than doom, and endless.”
[image error]In the comments section of Naomi’s post on Emily’s Quest, she and I have been been talking about ideas for a future LMM readalong. In the fall, maybe, or next winter? Who wants to join us, and what would you like to read? We’re talking about The Blue Castle, Jane of Lantern Hill, Pat of Silver Bush, or The Story Girl and The Golden Road, and the list goes on and on….
Naomi says, “Let’s just assume we’ll eventually get to them all!” I’d like to choose one or two to read over the summer. When I was in Charlottetown on Monday, I bought “Una of the Garden,” the story Montgomery published in The Housekeeper magazine and later transformed into a novel, Kilmeny of the Orchard, so I’m tempted to start there, but I’d be interested to hear what others are thinking.
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The illustration on the cover of Jane Urquhart’s book on L.M. Montgomery makes me think of something Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra on the subject of decorating a hat. She says in her letter, “I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit. What think you on that subject?” (11 June 1799)
March 17, 2017
“I have to write”: Emily Climbs
In L.M. Montgomery’s Emily Climbs (1925), one of the novels Emily Starr reads is The Children of the Abbey (1796), by Regina Maria Roche, which is also mentioned in Jane Austen’s Emma, when Harriet Smith tells Emma that Mr. Martin is going to read it because she’s recommended it. Emily laughs while she’s reading the novel, because “The heroine fainted in every chapter and cried quarts if anyone looked at her.” It’s the only novel Emily’s Aunt Ruth owns—and Aunt Ruth is shocked that Emily finds it funny, as she thinks it “a very sad volume” (Chapter 16).
There are no tears mentioned on the first page of The Children of the Abbey, but there’s one—a single “tear of unutterable joy”—on the second page, and it’s quickly followed by a description of the heroine, Amanda, “smiling through her tears.” In the second chapter, “a trickling tear stole down [Lady Malvina’s] lovely cheek, which, tinged as it was with the flush of agitation, looked now like a half-blown rose moistened with the dews of early morning.” And there are many more. For example: “her tears began to flow for the disastrous fate of her parents” (Chapter 45); “Tears at length relieved her painful oppression, she raised her languid head, she looked around, and wept with increasing violence at beholding what might be termed mementos of former happiness” (Chapter 55); “She wept, and sighed to think, that the happiness he had prayed for he could not behold” (Chapter 58). I can picture Emily laughing, and Aunt Ruth sighing, or perhaps allowing a single tear to trickle down her cheek.
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This rose (which I photographed in Charlottetown, PEI when I went to Leonhards café last December for coffee and a slice of their famous vanilla roll) is quite lovely, I think, but unfortunately it is not “moistened with the dews of early morning.”
Like Helen Glew, who says in her blog post about rereading Emily of New Moon as an adult that she was “struck by the literary nature of the book,” I’ve been paying more attention to literary allusions in the “Emily” novels this time around than I did the first time I read them, when I was ten. Helen highlights references to The Pilgrim’s Progress, Jane Eyre, and The Mill on the Floss. I can hear echoes of Mansfield Park as well, especially in the scene in Emily of New Moon in which Emily is given a room of her own and thinks, “I wonder if Aunt Elizabeth will ever let me have a little fire here” (Chapter 27), and in Emily Climbs when Aunt Ruth tells Emily that “Plays are wicked” (Chapter 10).
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Another photo from my December trip to PEI. This is near Victoria-by-the-Sea.
In Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery (2008), Elizabeth Waterston suggests that in Emily Climbs, “The constant literary allusions emphasize Emily’s similarity to her creator in tastes and influences. Emily’s journal, like Montgomery’s, mentions Scott’s poems, Viking sagas, Emerson’s essays, Tennyson, Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (1832), George Macdonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871), Byron, Macaulay, Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Hemans, the historical works of Francis Parkman, and Bliss Carman’s poetry.” (Thanks to “Buried in Print” for recommending Magic Island in a comment on my Emily of New Moon blog post last month.) I also enjoyed reading Waterston’s analysis of images of entrapment in the novel, of the names Montgomery chose for her characters, and of Emily’s response to both obstacles and opportunities as she pursues her dream of becoming a successful writer.
When I read this series for the first time, I’m pretty sure I focused more on Emily as a writer than on Emily as a reader. I was inspired by her determination to create a literary career for herself, to keep writing despite “brutal rejection slips and the awfulness of faint praise” (Chapter 22). Like Montgomery herself, Emily adopts the metaphor of climbing the “Alpine Path” when she thinks about her literary ambitions: “she would climb it, no matter what the obstacles in the way—no matter whether there was any one to help her or not” (Chapter 5). (Montgomery’s autobiography was published as “The Story of My Career” in 1917 and later as The Alpine Path. The phrase “the Alpine Path” comes from a poem by Ellen Rodman Church and Augusta De Bubna called “The Fringed Gentian,” which Montgomery pasted into one of her scrapbooks; an image of the scrapbook page is included in a virtual exhibition curated by Elizabeth Rollins Epperly.)
Even when Emily feels she doesn’t have time, she keeps writing: “I haven’t a moment of time for writing anything. … But I have to write. So I get up in the morning as soon as it is daylight, dress, and put on a coat—for the mornings are cold now—sit down and scribble for a priceless hour. … That hour in the grey morning is the most delightful one in the day for me” (Chapter 7).
Reading about Emily’s persistence in writing stories and sending them to publishers made me want to do the same thing, and when I was ten, the year I read these novels, I wrote two stories that were strongly influenced by Emily’s own history and by what she was writing.
The first story, “Alone,” opens with ten-year-old Katie being told by her uncle’s housekeeper that her beloved Uncle Mac has died. I just noticed now, rereading the story, that she cries in Chapter 1, but then at the funeral, in Chapter 2, “not once did she let a tear fall.” She doesn’t faint, either. Katie is sent to live with her Great-Aunt Lucy, who dies the very next night, and then she’s sent to an orphanage, where she makes friends with a girl named Alice and the two of them plan to run away. Eventually, they find a home with a kind woman who adopts both of them—and then, “as most stories usually do, this one ends. And they all lived happily ever after!” Anne of Green Gables is obviously another influence.
I’m pleased, and a little embarrassed, to say that this story was included in a collection published by the Halifax City Regional Library. I guess that must have been my first published story. And I haven’t published any fiction, yet, as an adult, though I’ve spent the past several years working on a novel. (I mentioned my novel at the end of a blog post I wrote last fall.) I’ve been working on a new round of revisions and I’m much happier with the manuscript now. As soon as I have anything else to report, I’ll be sure to share the news here.
I suppose I could show you a photo of the manuscript, or maybe of my laptop and coffee cup, or something like that, but instead I’ll show you a photo I took the other day when I was on my way to a café in Herring Cove to work on the novel. I liked the colours of the sea and sky so much that I’ve made this the banner photo for the blog.
Anyway—back to the second Emily-inspired story I wrote when I was ten. It’s called “A Night in the Old Garden.” I knew the plot of “Alone” owed a great deal to Emily of New Moon, but I had forgotten that there was also a connection between Emily Climbs and the second story. In this case, it’s just the title. Emily’s poem is called Night in the Garden, and I don’t think the flowers come to life, as they do in my story. Here’s how my story begins: “There was a strange feeling about the moors as I walked slowly towards the old garden that night. … I started to draw the old garden, but the flowers kept making horrible, twisted faces at me….”
I showed “Alone” and “A Night in the Old Garden” to my grandmother, who shared them with a friend of hers, Lois Valli, who drew several sketches to illustrate each story. And then my grandmother traced and stitched the outlines of some of the sketches onto a quilt she was making for me. I still have the quilt, of course, and I’ll always treasure it, as it reminds me not only that my grandmother believed in my writing, but also that her own creative work has been a source of inspiration for me all my life. She loved painting, drawing, quilting, and writing letters and poetry. And she loved reading.
I wish I’d kept track of the books I’ve read over the years, beginning either when I was ten and discovered the “Emily” series or sometime soon after that. I know I’ve often mentioned books in diary entries, but I do wish I had a more complete list of what I read and when. Vicki Ziegler wrote recently about the notebook in which she’s recorded the books she’s read over the past thirty-four years, and I felt quite envious when I read her blog post (“What I Read in 2016”). I also felt a shock of recognition, because the notebook she uses looks very much like the one a friend gave me sometime in the 1980s.
Seeing Vicki’s photo prompted me to search for my notebook. I didn’t know for sure whether I still had it, or, if I did, where I would have put it, but I was fairly certain that I hadn’t written on very many of its pages. It didn’t take too long to find it—it wasn’t in the same box as my two stories, but it turned up in a box nearby—and I discovered that at some point in the past, I tore out and discarded several pages. I don’t think I burned them; I’m sure I would remember if I had done something that dramatic, or if what I had written was so scandalous that it merited that fate. Thus, while I don’t know what was written on those pages, I have a new opportunity to begin a record of the books I’m reading. (Plus, my notebook looks kind of like Vicki’s, which I think is awesome.)
Naturally, I’ve started with Emily of New Moon and Emily Climbs. For about four years now, I’ve kept track of at least some of the books I’ve been reading—the ones I want to be sure to remember—on Goodreads. (Please do come and find me there! I’m always interested in hearing recommendations.) So I’ll consult that online list when I record in my “new” notebook the titles of other books I’ve read this winter, including Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, Lisa Moore’s Flannery, Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder, and Juliet McMaster’s Jane Austen, Young Author—all of which I recommend highly.
I’ve also had the privilege to read Melanie J. Fishbane’s wonderful novel Maud, which focuses on L.M. Montgomery as a teenager, during the years when she was, like Emily, beginning to work seriously on her writing. (Maud will be published by Penguin Random House on April 25th.)
I love the way Montgomery shows how important Emily Starr’s reading is to her career as a writer, and I’m now curious to find out what she reads in Emily’s Quest. And, of course, to find out what she writes.
This blog post is the second in a series for the Emily Readalong (#ReadingEmily) hosted by Naomi of Consumed by Ink. Here’s Naomi’s blog post “Emily Readalong: Emily of New Moon,” which includes links to what other bloggers have written about the novel. And, in case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s my first post for the series: “‘I am important to myself’: Emily of New Moon.” I’m planning to write about Emily’s Quest in April.
A few more of the passages I underlined in Emily Climbs:
Emily’s diary “seemed to her like a personal friend and a safe confidant for certain matters which burned for expression and yet were too combustible to be trusted to the ears of any living being.” (Chapter 1)
“I have made up my mind that I will never marry,” Emily tells her diary. “I shall be wedded to my art.” (Chapter 1) (Mary Henley Rubio says in Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings that when Montgomery was writing Emily Climbs, “She felt little interest in it. Her readers would demand that Emily grow up, marry, and live happily ever after. Maud had been in a state of heady excitement when she wrote both Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon, but it was only her personal discipline that got her through the sequels, where her feisty heroines had to be tamed.”)
“Nothing ever seems as big or as terrible—oh, nor as beautiful and grand either, alas!—when it is written out, as it does when you are thinking or feeling about it. It seems to shrink directly you put it into words. … Oh, if only I could put things into words as I see them! … but it seems to me there is something beyond words—any words—all words—something that always escapes you when you try to grasp it—and yet leaves something in your hand which you wouldn’t have had if you hadn’t reached for it.” (Chapter 1)
A comment from the narrator: “I have never pretended, nor ever will pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.” (Chapter 1)
“I am not anybody’s ‘property,’ not even in fun. And I never will be.” (Chapter 2)
“Well, it all comes down to this, there’s no use trying to live in other people’s opinions. The only thing to do is live in your own. After all, I believe in myself.” (Chapter 4)
“Keats is too full of beauty. When I read his poetry … I always feel a sort of despair! What is the use of trying to do what has been done, once and for all?” (Chapter 19)
On whether to stay in Prince Edward Island, or leave home to pursue a literary career: “as for material—people live here just the same as anywhere else—suffer and enjoy and aspire just as they do in New York.” (Chapter 24)
February 17, 2017
“I am important to myself”: Emily of New Moon
“I am important to myself,” says Emily Byrd Starr when she’s told by her late father’s housekeeper that she ought to be “thankful to get a home anywhere” and to remember that she’s “not of much importance.” “This is an extraordinary assertion,” writes Mary Henley Rubio, “in an era when young girls were socialized into domesticity, subordinating their identity to their husbands and family” (Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings). Many girls “must have been amazed at Emily’s audacity, while tucking away the comment as an empowering idea,” says Benjamin Lefebvre (The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume Two: A Critical Heritage).
This month, I read L.M. Montgomery’s 1923 novel Emily of New Moon for the first time in many years, and while I remembered some aspects of Emily’s journey to become a writer—the diary she burns after her aunt reads part of it, the letters she writes to her father after his death, her ambition to become both a poet and a novelist—I had forgotten just how strict her Aunt Elizabeth is, how cruel her teacher is, and how much Emily has to fight to be taken seriously as a person.
After her father dies and she’s taken to New Moon to live with her relatives, she becomes friends with Cousin Jimmy, who tells her he’s “composed a thousand poems” and has never written any of them down. Emily discovers she, too, can write poetry. “Perhaps I could have written it long ago if I’d tried,” she thinks. Aunt Elizabeth won’t let her have any paper, but Emily finds she can compose in her head, just as Cousin Jimmy does. Sometimes she writes on her slate at school, “but these scribblings had to be rubbed off sooner or later—which left Emily with a sense of loss—and there was always the danger that Miss Brownell would see them.”
Eventually, Miss Brownell does catch her writing, and Emily endures humiliation from her teacher. “Really, children,” Miss Brownell says to her students, “we seem to have a budding poet among us. … It is a whole slateful of—poetry—think of that, children—poetry. We have a pupil in this school who can write—poetry. And she does not want us to read this—poetry. I am afraid Emily is selfish. I am sure we should all enjoy this—poetry.”
[image error]Once again, Emily feels she must destroy what she has written, just as she did even before she came to New Moon, when she saw Aunt Elizabeth reading her diary. She has nothing to wipe her slate clean, so she “gave the palm of her hand a fierce lick and one side of the slate was wiped off. Another lick—and the rest of the poem went.” But then when Miss Brownell threatens to burn the other poems Emily has been keeping in her desk, Emily snatches the pages back from her and, in a scene worthy of Elizabeth Bennet standing up to Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, she refuses to give them back.
“I will not,” she insists. “They are mine. You have no right to them. I wrote them at recesses. I didn’t break any rules.” And then she adds, “You are an unjust, tyrannical person.” She knows she’ll be punished, but she is determined “they should not get her poems—not one of them, no matter what they did to her.” Near the end of the novel, when Aunt Elizabeth finds and reads Emily’s letters to her father, she again defends her work and refuses to allow it to be destroyed. “I’d sooner burn myself,” she declares. Her attitude toward her writing has changed a great deal since the early chapter in which she burned her diary to prevent her aunt from reading any more of it.
Forced by Aunt Elizabeth to apologize to her teacher, Emily says, “I am sorry for anything I did to-day that was wrong … and I ask your pardon for it.” Forbidden to speak to anyone until the following day, she asks her aunt, “But you won’t forbid me to think?” And, left alone in the pantry to eat only bread and milk for her supper, she begins to compose an epic poem in her mind.
On this reading of the novel, I found Emily’s meeting with Father Cassidy especially interesting. I had forgotten that he’s one of the few people who encourage her to write. She goes to see him to ask him to persuade her neighbour not to cut down the beautiful trees near New Moon. She confesses that she’s a “poetess,” and his initial reply is not very encouraging: “Holy Mike! That is serious,” he says. “I don’t know if I can do much for you. How long have you been that way?” (I’m not sure how I could have forgotten his distinctive voice. I certainly remember Mr. Carpenter’s voice, much later, in Emily’s Quest, telling Emily to “Beware—of—italics.” But I’m getting ahead of myself now, as that’s the novel I plan to read in April.) After she’s told Father Cassidy more about her writing, he tells her to “keep on writing poetry,” which no one else has ever told her, and he assures her that “The path of genius never did run smooth.”
After this conversation, Emily even begins to think she might write novels as well as poems. “But Aunt Elizabeth won’t let me read any novels so how can I find out how to write them?” she wonders, which is an excellent question. (Aunt Elizabeth says, “They are wicked books and have ruined many souls,” but Emily manages to read The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest before she’s forbidden to read the books at her friend Ilse’s house.)
I love what Emily says when she begins to think of her future audience: “‘Another thing that worries me, if I do grow up and write a wonderful poem, perhaps people won’t see how wonderful it is.’”
I remembered reading about what happened when Mary Rubio gave Alice Munro a copy of Montgomery’s journals, so I looked up that passage again in Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings: Rubio says, “When I handed Alice Munro a gift copy of the first volume of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 1, at the Ginger Press Bookstore in Owen Sound, Ontario, in late 1985, she looked at it for only a second to see what it was, and then, without missing a beat or without making any reference to Emily of New Moon, she responded by quoting the end of the novel: ‘I am going to write a diary that it may be published when I die.’” In this short “Appreciation of Alice Munro,” Margaret Atwood and Lisa Dickler Awano talk about how Montgomery’s novels influenced Munro when she was growing up, at a time when “the idea of being a writer was so alien. Just to think you could do it was an act of major hubris.”
The Emily novels have served as an inspiration to many young women who dreamt of becoming writers, as Benjamin Lefebvre notes in The L.M. Montgomery Reader: Volume Two. He mentions, for example, Munro, Atwood, Margaret Lawrence, Astrid Lindgren, Rosemary Sutcliff, Jean Little, and Carol Shields. I know Munro wrote an afterword for Emily of New Moon, but I don’t (yet) have a copy of that edition. Have any of you read it?
In between chapters of Emily of New Moon, I’ve been reading Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls (2016), a collection of short biographies of strong and inspiring women. L.M. Montgomery doesn’t make an appearance in the book, unfortunately, but I was happy to find that Jane Austen is included. Montgomery and her strong heroines, especially Emily, with her insistence that “I am important to myself,” and Anne Shirley, would fit right in.
[image error]Rebel Girls is intended to be both “heartwarming” and “thought-provoking,” and I’d say both of those terms apply to the collection, right from the dedication page. It’s dedicated “To the rebel girls of the world.” Heartwarming: “Dream bigger, Aim higher, Fight harder.” Thought-provoking: “And, when in doubt, remember, You are right.” I have to say, I think it’s dangerous for any girl, or boy, to grow up believing she or he is always right. There’s no room for education, something that was clearly important to the ambitious women featured in Rebel Girls, just as it was important to Montgomery, and to the fictional Emily Starr, who, for all her confidence in her own importance, is a great example of a heroine who knows she has much to learn, and is determined to get a good education.
This month, I’ve also been rereading Persuasion, because I’m writing a lecture on “Anne Elliot’s Ambitions” for the Jane Austen Society conference in Halifax in June. I was struck by the similarity between the opening of Emily of New Moon, in which Emily’s told she’s “not of much importance,” and the opening of Persuasion, in which the reader learns the Elliot family doesn’t think Anne is important: “She was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight. Her convenience was always to give way—she was only Anne.” (Miriam Rheingold Fuller talks about the influence of Persuasion on Montgomery’s Anne of the Island in her essay “Jane of Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery’s Reworking of Jane Austen’s Legacy.”)
Montgomery is most famous, of course, for Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, and, as many readers have noticed, Emily resembles Anne Shirley. Sometimes she even sounds just like her. “Oh, isn’t it good to be alive—like this?” Emily says to her friends Ilse and Teddy during one of the evenings when “they all three sat on the crazy veranda steps in the mystery and enchantment of the borderland ’tween light and dark” and “a great round yellow moon rose over the fields.” “Wouldn’t it be dreadful if one had never lived?” she asks them. This passage makes me think of Anne saying to Diana, in Anne of Green Gables, “It’s good to be alive and to be going home.”
Later in Emily of New Moon, when Emily believes she is going to die after eating an apple and then hearing from her neighbour that it was full of poison, she laments her lost happiness—“She had thought she was going to live for years and write great poems and be famous like Mrs. Hemans”—and then when she finds she hasn’t been poisoned after all, she is thrilled to be alive. “Oh, it was nice just to be alone and to be alive,” and to be able to write more: “Emily already saw a yard of verses entitled ‘Thoughts of One Doomed to Sudden Death.’”
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I took this photo last winter for a class on The Art of Photography, and I just realized it could work here as an illustration. There was no rat poison in this apple, either. Obviously.
Like Anne, Emily is interested in roads and paths. (I’ve written before about Anne’s love of “The Bend in the Road,” the title of the last chapter of Anne of Green Gables.) Emily talks about three paths through the bush: “the To-day Road, the Yesterday Road, and the To-morrow Road.” One is “lovely now,” one is “out in the stumps” and “used to be lovely,” and the third “is going to be lovely some day, when the maples are bigger.”
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I’m always glad of an excuse to include a photo of “The Bend in the Road.” This is Warburton Road, in Fredericton, PEI.
With all these similarities between Anne and Emily, it’s fascinating to learn that Montgomery preferred writing about Emily. “It is the best book I have ever written,” she wrote in her journal, “—and I have had more intense pleasure in writing it than any of the others—not even excepting Green Gables. I have lived it, and I hated to pen the last line and write finis. Of course, I’ll have to write several sequels but they will be more or less hackwork I fear. They cannot be to me what this book has been” (February 15, 1922).
As I mentioned in last month’s blog post, Naomi at Consumed By Ink is hosting this Emily Readalong, and the idea is to read Emily Climbs next month and then Emily’s Quest in April. Do those two novels seem like “hackwork”? I don’t remember. Feel free to join us in reading these three novels, by commenting on blog posts or writing your own, or by discussing the books on social media (#ReadingEmily).
In her February post on Emily of New Moon, Naomi talks about the similarities between Anne and Emily and she raises excellent questions about some of the other characters in the novel, particularly Mrs. Kent (controlling?) and Dean Priest (creepy?). She also includes images of many different covers for Emily, noting that in general, the Emily covers are “not as bright and cheery” as the covers of the Anne novels.
One last thought about—or at least tangentially related to!—Emily of New Moon: when I read about Aunt Laura rubbing mutton tallow on Emily’s chapped hands in the winter, I couldn’t help thinking of Dan Macey’s blog post from last winter’s “Emma in the Snow” celebration, because he wrote about “Discovering Mutton in Emma: The Quest to Please the Principals’ Palates.” The word “mutton” always reminds me of the line from Jane Austen’s letter to her sister Cassandra about how “Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full of Joints of Mutton and doses of rhubarb” (September 8, 1816). And now, the word also reminds me of Dan’s research and the recipes he created for the characters in Austen’s Emma. As it happened, the day after I read the passage about mutton tallow in Emily of New Moon, I learned that Dan’s blog post on mutton has been shortlisted for an International Association of Culinary Professionals Food Writing award. Congratulations, Dan!
(Emily writes, “It is hard to write poetry with chapped hands. I wonder if Mrs. Hemans ever had chapped hands. It does not mention anything like that in her biograffy.”)
This past week in Nova Scotia, we’ve had several snow days, so I’ve been thinking about this Readalong as “Emily in the Snow.” I’ll spare you the photos of the snow mountains in my neighbourhood—I posted plenty of photos of snow last winter during the “Emma in the Snow” celebrations. There’s far more snow this winter; in fact, right now, it looks pretty much the way it did in March of 2015, when I was participating in the Anne of Green Gables Readalong and I included a snow photo in this post on “Attending Redmond College with Anne Shirley.” Just as I did that month, I’m dreaming of a summer visit to PEI (and of raspberry cordial at the Blue Winds Tea Room in New London).
Okay, I think this blog post is long enough. Probably too long. I’m going to stop writing about Emily of New Moon for now, and start reading Emily Climbs. Or maybe I’ll read Felicia Hemans’s poem “Kindred Hearts”….
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My McClelland and Stewart “Canadian Favourites” edition of Emily of New Moon
January 30, 2017
Rereading L.M. Montgomery’s “Emily” Novels
I’m planning to reread L.M. Montgomery’s “Emily” novels this year, along with Naomi of Consumed by Ink and other bloggers. Anyone want to join us? We’d love to have company.
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From a short holiday in PEI a few weeks ago
Here’s Naomi’s invitation to participate: “An Emily Readalong.”
February: Emily of New Moon (1923)
March: Emily Climbs (1925)
April: Emily’s Quest (1927)
My “L.M. Montgomery in Nova Scotia” page.
December 16, 2016
Jane Austen and Grandparents
In honour of Jane Austen’s 241st birthday, I’m posting an essay by Nora Bartlett on “Jane Austen and Grandparents.” Nora wrote the first guest post for the blog series on Austen’s Emma that I hosted last winter, and she kindly gave me permission to use the title of her contribution, “Emma in the Snow,” as the title of the whole series.
Nora died of cancer on August 14, 2016, and will be much missed by her family and her friends and colleagues around the world. She taught part-time for more than twenty years at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, she worked with adults in various lifelong learning programs, and she often wrote and lectured on Jane Austen and her novels. I never met Nora in person, but I thought of her as a dear friend, and I miss hearing her voice in the lively letters she sent me. I will treasure the memory of our correspondence about Austen and other writers. We also had several conversations about snow—not enough in Scotland, Nora said, for someone born in upstate New York, as she was, and accustomed to white winters; too much in Nova Scotia, I complained to her during the infamous storms of March, 2015.
It’s a pleasure and an honour to share with you Nora’s essay on grandparents, which she sent to me a few days before she died. I wanted to save it for a special occasion and Jane Austen’s birthday seemed like a good choice. For an author photo, Nora sent me this picture of her with her horse Bert, jumping in the paddock by the sea. She told me he was named after Bert from Sesame Street “and resembles him in rectitude and in looking embarrassed rather than conspiratorial when anyone says or does anything funny.”
You could not, with any confidence, expect to see your grandchildren in the world we have lost. —Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost
[image error]When Jane Austen was born in 1775, she had no grandparents living, her father having been orphaned young and her mother left parentless by 1768. From her teens, though, she lived with parents who were also grandparents, and her own talents as an aunt are testified to very convincingly in her nephew’s Memoir and elsewhere. For this essay, the question I began with, given the availability of the grandparent-grandchild relationship to her everyday experience, was why so few of her mature novels explore this relationship very fully. There are absurd grandparents in her juvenilia, like the mysterious stranger who comes and goes in a trice in “Love and Freindship”: after finding that he is grandfather to a mounting number of distinctly dodgy young people, he dispenses £50 notes and vanishes. And there are the longsuffering, letter-writing grandparents who battle with dignity against the threat posed to their children and grandchildren by the insidious charms of Lady Susan in that savage, anti-filial little work. But Pride and Prejudice is without depicted grandparents, and Mansfield Park with its disastrous marriage and its many thwarted marriages, almost seems—but only almost, as we’ll see—designed to disappoint all hopes of parents to become grandparents.
In thinking Jane Austen gave little attention to realistic grandparental hopes, wishes, and experiences, however, I was wrong—both from lack of alertness to the novels and from failing at first to realize that, though the Austens were a multi-generation family, such a lucky experience, in a time of high infant mortality, late marriage and early death, was rare. As figures in Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost (1965) show, before the economic transformations of the early 19th century, less than 25% of the population of England was ever over 40—in Laslett’s telling phrase, “conversation across the generations must have been rare, much rarer than it is today.” Although the conversation in Emma between Emma and Harriet about Robert Martin’s prospects for marriage mimics the tone of an older, wiser woman advising a very young one and is not a reflection of Emma’s serious thinking—indeed, like much of Emma’s talk, it reflects no thought at all—it does show some knowledge of how her social and economic inferiors made decisions about marriage. Only at the more prosperous level, which Jane Austen usually concentrates on, could a Mrs. Bennet be aiming at the prospect of a marriage for one of her daughters “since Jane was sixteen” (Volume 3, Chapter 8).
The Austens themselves were a long-lived family. Even Jane survived her 40th birthday, and her brothers were able to marry early, and to marry young women, some of whom had their first children while still in their teens. The brothers’ marital experience also reflected the high rate of early death of first wife and husband remarriage, a phenomenon also noted by Laslett. With young children needing a mother’s care, there would often be a remarriage. Of the five Austen brothers who married, four were married twice. The extensive grandparental experience testified to in the Memoir rested on these then-natural developments of family life, but even more it rested on the senior Austens’ long and healthy—despite Mrs. Austen’s claims to invalidism—lives, which were somewhat exceptional, since though the privileged could marry early they could not—despite their greater access to medical care—depend on that care to guarantee better health than lack of such care gave to the poor. Neither the richest of her brothers, nor the poorest, could keep his first wife alive, an experience perhaps reflected in the persistent family myth that Emma’s Jane Fairfax, married into one of the richest families Jane Austen deals with, is to die in childbirth. It might be possible to see the novels as reflecting both the general experience, with not many grandparents about, and her own, with grandparents taking an active role in the upbringing of their grandchildren.
For, as we’ll see, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion on careful examination turn out to be looking quite hard at grandparents and grandchildren. And Persuasion uses the experience of the grandparent and the treatment of grandchildren, rather as some of the other novels use behavior with money, to enable us to see deeply—though often in a quick, deft, sketch-fashion—into the moral and imaginative lives of Austen’s characters. So the question I started with—“why so few grandparents and grandchildren?”—has turned into “why so many”!
[image error]If we run briskly through the novels in order of publication, and jettison Northanger Abbey, that late-published, early-written novel, as of no interest to the discussion because there is not a grandparent in sight, we see that Sense and Sensibility gives us two widowed grandmothers, Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Ferrars, and one very funny scene in Volume 2, Chapter 12 of these two nearly coming to blows over the relative heights of two of their grandchildren, only one of whom is present. For Mrs. Jennings, the affectionate grandmother, the novel also provides a new baby, “a son and heir” for the daughter to whom she is closer, Mrs. Palmer (Volume 2, Chapter 14). At the novel’s end, there is also an almost coy nudge to the reader, an arch bit of indirection about Elinor’s pregnancy, hinted at via their need for “rather better pasturage for their cows” (Volume 3, Chapter 14). This child will have both Mrs. Dashwood and Mrs. Ferrars as grandmothers, and both women are widows. Thus, like the Middleton children and Harry Dashwood, Edward and Elinor’s baby will have no living grandfather.
[image error]In Pride and Prejudice we are spared seeing how either of the Bennets would anticipate either a Bingley, or a Darcy—or, horrors, a Wickham—baby. That is outside the book’s scope. But there is the “young olive branch” of Charlotte and Mr. Collins. One has great hopes for the humor and good sense with which any child of Charlotte’s will be brought up; and that baby will have two grandparents, in the Lucases, presumably spending more time than ever calculating how long Mr. Bennet is likely to live.
Mansfield Park, as I’ve suggested, operates almost actively against a parent’s natural wish for grandchildren: the wedding we see ends in bitterness and shame, and two prospective marriages between Bertrams (if Fanny here counts as a Bertram, as she seems to when her uncle is pressing for the marriage) and Crawfords fail to come off, and though the marriage between Mr. Yates and Julia turns out to be less catastrophic than circumstances suggested it might, one feels they both need to grow up themselves before any children would be a blessing.
[image error]But with the same coyness—or is it archness?—the sly indirection, the faint nudge, as in Sense and Sensibility, closes the novel as Fanny and Edmund “had been married long enough to begin to want an increase of income, and feel their distance from the paternal abode an inconvenience” (Volume 3, Chapter 12). The plot—Dr. Grant’s bathetic death from over-eating, and the expectation of a grandchild, never made explicit—moves them to Mansfield parsonage, so much easier for the new grandparents. Here is another living pair—this baby will have both grandfather and grandmother. We might note that the move closer to Mansfield is not a move closer to Portsmouth, where there will be another grandparental pair. It seems likely that Mrs. Price will content herself with a note saying she will knit something when she can find some time, and that the Bertrams, deprived of other grandchildren by their parental failings, will reap the grandparental benefits of their generosity in adopting Fanny.
Emma, on the other hand, could almost be thought to have been devised with the grandparental relationship in mind, as Mr. Woodhouse has five grandchildren. Unlike the other young mother of a large family whom we see in the novels, Mrs. Gardiner, who is calm and confident, Isabella Knightley is forever anxious about her own and her family’s health and takes them with her everywhere. Thus Hartfield at Christmas, unlike Longbourn, is full of children. And then in the early summer Emma and her father are left in charge of the two eldest Knightley boys. We see Mr. Woodhouse in action as a grandfather—as much as we see him in action in anything!—mostly fretting about that holiday at the seaside and its threats, then fussing over Mr. Knightley’s tossing the little boys high up into the air, but also enjoying the little word game Emma has made for them, at which he is probably pretty much at their skill level, or not so much below them that it is no fun for anyone but him. Just as he was an anxious father he is an anxious grandfather, although he is a devoted, attentive one. Sadly, we see no scenes of his supervising their eating, which must require much sleight of hand on Emma’s part to get the requisite calories into a pair of hungry boys.
[image error]Like so many of Jane Austen’s grandparents, Mr. Woodhouse is widowed, as is the novel’s other grandparent, his “worthy old friend” Mrs. Bates (Volume 3, Chapter 9). The household over the shop in Highbury is therefore all female, and includes three generations. I think we need to take some time to think about Jane Fairfax’s difficult situation in that too-small house with the endlessly talking and thoroughly well-meaning Miss Bates. Mrs. Bates’s deafness may be a trial to her daughter, though she does not complain, only describes (“I say one thing, and then I say another,” says Miss Bates, which the reader has no difficulty believing [Volume 2, Chapter 9]). But surely Mrs. Bates’s great age and her extreme deafness may sometimes produce the blessed effect of total silence. Mrs. Bates seems quite content to be left out of things, and there must be times when Miss Bates is out, or talking to Patty in the kitchen, and then one imagines Jane pressing her aching head, silently, to some cushion and neither having to speak nor to listen. At times the deaf old lady may have been her best friend and a desperately needed resource.
There is, of course, no sly allusion at the end of Emma to possible babies—who, with Emma, would dare? Beyond the seaside honeymoon all else is outside the novel’s scope; that is, all but perfect happiness. Perfect happiness is in store for the rather more deserving Anne Elliot, too, at the end of Persuasion, but, like Emma, Persuasion is a book about grandparents and grandchildren. The warm, unaffected Musgroves offer the reader the opportunity to observe a grandparent’s trials, perhaps more than a grandparent’s rewards. Parents themselves almost beyond count, the older Musgroves have not been prepared by their own (mostly) happy and contented children for dealing with the consequences of Mary’s sulky, erratic mothering, as Anne learns on arrival at Uppercross: “Oh! Miss Anne, I cannot help wishing Mrs. Charles had a little of your method with those children. . . —Bless me! how troublesome they are sometimes” (Volume 1, Chapter 6). “Troublesomeness”—which the reader sees again and again, which steadily advances the plot and helps control the novel’s action as it slowly turns and turns, returning Anne and Captain Wentworth to a right knowledge of their own feelings.
Many readers have been struck by the physical intensity of the scene in which the toddler is clinging stickily to Anne’s neck until a whirling moment in which “she found herself in the state of being released . . . someone was taking him from her . . . Captain Wentworth had done it” (Volume 1, Chapter 9). Maria Edgeworth, for example, wrote to a friend in 1818, “Don’t you see Captain Wentworth taking the boisterous toddler off her back as she bends over the sick boy on the sofa? Or rather don’t you feel it?” (quoted in Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas [1988]).
Persuasion is the novel in which Jane Austen risks more of these high-intensity, shatter-the-surface moments. The last one at the White Hart inn in Bath will leave Anne, in Charles’s Musgrove’s honest, affectionate words, “rather done for” (Volume 2, Chapter 11), as the moment of Anne’s release from her nephew leaves most readers.
Another exceptionally rich moment that focuses on grandchildren is the Christmas scene at Uppercross Hall. This time, the grandparents are securely in control, and the scene has no role in the plot except to demonstrate to the reader how Anne has learnt, in the months at Uppercross, to relax and enjoy herself. The scene bears comparison, lean and concise though it is in style, with the glorious hyperbolic Christmas at old Fezziwig’s that haunts Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol:
[image error]There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came . . . when the fiddler . . . struck up “Sir Roger de Coverley.” Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.
This section is about a page long; Uppercross Christmas, so trim it is easy to miss, is a paragraph in Chapter 2 of Volume 2, and depicts the visiting Harville children, the Musgrove children home from school. The girls gather around the table, “chattering” and “cutting up silk and gold paper,” while at a host of other tables “bending under the weight of brawn and cold pies . . . riotous boys were holding high revel,” and the scene is “completed by a roaring Christmas fire.”
Without the sensory overload—the “more” and “more” of the Fezziwig scene—there is nevertheless a quality of perfectly judged sensory delight here: one hears the “chatter,” and almost hears the scissors snipping, sees the pleasurable flimsiness and flash of gold and silk, smells those pies, and all is brought together with care by the solidity of the tables and trestles, and the sound of the fire, which gives the reader gratifyingly more than just enough, but never too much.
But we would want to note that even in the midst of this idyll there is grandparental labor to be done, the “sedulous guarding” of the well-brought up young Harvilles “from the tyranny of the two children from the Cottage, expressly arrived to amuse them.” As with the list of pleasures, every word here describing the pains of family life is placed with care, and the irony of “tyranny”/“amuse” speaks very clearly to the reader who has paid attention to those unruly young boys. Affection and fun—Mr. Musgrove shouting into Lady Russell’s ear while small children clamor on his knees—but “guarding,” too. This “fine family-piece,” as the paragraph concludes, is also a fine grandparental piece.
If this is an almost symbolic moment, renewing the early admiring tones about the elder Musgroves being formed in “the old English style” (Volume 1, Chapter 5), the famous picture with which the novel opens, of Sir Walter Elliot reading his own entry in the Baronetage, has its symbolic aspect, too. From the image of Sir Walter reading we are moved right into looking over his shoulder to read exactly what he is reading, and also to see what, in the past, he has written into this moveable feast of a book. And if we see the Musgroves through their commonplace everyday pleasures, we see Sir Walter through his—and through the pleasures and pains he has avoided.
[image error]Sir Walter has amended the entry—“improved it by adding, for the information of himself and his family, these words, after the date of Mary’s birth—‘Married, December 16, 1810, Charles, son and heir of Charles Musgrove, Esq. of Uppercross, in the country of Somerset,’ and by inserting most accurately the day of the month on which he had lost his wife.” One feels intuitively that Sir Walter would have beautiful penmanship. There are no blots or splodges there. And well-known though it is, the paragraph—the corrected paragraph in particular—gives us much to think about. He has not added the births of his grandsons, who, of course, do not carry the Elliot name. They are not in line to inherit the baronetcy, or Kellynch Hall. Neither will they be dependent on the now-shaky Elliot finances for their own start in life. Whatever of “pride—the Elliot pride” (Volume 1, Chapter 10) Mary manages to pump into them will not be enhanced by their grandpapa’s efforts.
His total silence here about the grandchildren is echoed throughout the novel, as Sir Walter nowhere—nowhere—acknowledges that he is a grandfather. Can it be his vanity, his unwillingness to consider himself old enough for the grandfather role? Possibly. But possibly it is something even less active, and more repellent: Sir Walter does not seem to remember that his grandsons exist. The messages sent to Mary by Sir Walter and Elizabeth do not mention the boys—something which the narrative highlights by contrasting Mrs. Clay’s “more decent attention, in an inquiry after Mrs. Charles Musgrove, and her fine little boys” (Volume 2, Chapter 6). In every inquiry after the Cottage household it is only Mary—the Elliot—who is mentioned, though even there neither father nor sister waits to hear the answer. When Mary and Charles arrive in Bath the boys are not mentioned. Since we have no quoted or reported speech from the two little Cottage boys—or any other child—it isn’t really possible to estimate the importance the Elliot side of the family has in their imaginations. It feels as if Sir Walter may have as little presence in their lives as they have in his.
Neither side could have the role the cultivated Austens played in their grandchildren’s lives, of inspiring reading and writing. The male Musgroves cheerfully accept their limitations, to “sport; . . . without benefit from books or anything else” (Volume 1, Chapter 6), while the ladies focus on household matters, dress, a little light music. But despite all the pride, we are assured that Sir Walter never reads anything but the Baronetage, and every time we see Elizabeth with a book she is closing it. And I think we can feel reasonably sure that Mary’s delight with the Lyme circulating library is not caused by her finally being able to get hold of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women! Where the depiction of grandparents may reflect Jane Austen’s own experience, though, is in the Musgroves, however commonplace and rough-hewn they are, because they are shown, as the Austens are in the letters and the family Memoir, in loving connection with their grandchildren, not just at Christmas, but every day. The chilly blank of Sir Walter’s lack of connection thus has in the Musgroves a moral yardstick—but also something more.
For one thing of which Sir Walter is not accused by the world who would call him a “foolish, spendthrift baronet” (Volume 2, Chapter 12) is a lack of family pride. Yet, just as the novel shows from the outset that his pride in Kellynch Hall is something of a delusion (as he deserts it at the first opportunity), it also shows him—and it is in the treatment of his living descendants that it shows him—essentially without the real family pride that keeps the Baronetage going.
The “book of books” is steeped in dynastic drive. Those marriages to “Marys” and “Elizabeths” that made and marred fortunes and futures, the “exertions of loyalty” “mentioned in Dugdale,” though set in the past, were made by men and women who thought not only of their family name but about the future of that name—about their legacy, their descendants (Volume 1, Chapter 1). Some of the Elliots of the past must have been violent men and determined women, carving out a dynasty, not a race of courtiers and fops gazing into an endless series of mirrors. Sir Walter cannot be blamed for—like Mr. Bennet—failing to produce a male heir. (The reader feels sure poor Lady Elliot, leaving three daughters, bore the brunt of that blame.) But he can be blamed, and is, in the novel, both by his own grandparental blanks and the Musgroves’ steady exertions: their undemonstrative energy—they are an old county family that is rising in the world, not falling—is contrasted with Sir Walter’s and Elizabeth’s stasis.
In the White Hart scene which gives so much warmth and bustle, chatter and action to the second volume of the novel, there is the unforgettable eruption—missile-like—of Sir Walter and Elizabeth which effects a physical drop in temperature, “a general chill . . . an instant oppression” of the happy group spirit which shames Anne (Volume 2, Chapter 10). Throughout the novel we see her, though a dutiful and loyal, uncomplaining daughter and sister to these worthless people, shamed by their callousness and irresponsibility. That Anne, thoughtful Anne—and like Jane Austen Anne is a loving aunt, who even in her darkest hours can take some pleasure in having been of use in caring for the little boys—does not reflect, as far as the reader knows, on her father’s shortcomings as a grandparent. She is aware of his failings in upholding the values of “an ancient family,” and sadly certain the Elliot tenants and other dependents will be better looked after by the incoming Crofts: she “felt the parish to be so sure of a good example, and the poor of the best attention and relief, that however sorry and ashamed for the necessity of the removal, she could not but in conscience feel that they were gone who deserved not to stay, and that Kellynch Hall had passed into better hands than its owners’” (Volume 2, Chapter 1). And of course the childless Admiral Croft, in a scene with the little boys, behaves much more like an indulgent grandfather with them, than even Mr. Musgrove does (Volume 1, Chapter 6).
At the opening of Volume 2, “the little boys at the cottage”—left to the care of servants as the family from the big house leave to support Louisa at Lyme—are presented in an almost symbolic way, an analogue to Anne’s own neglect. In reality, of course, elements are already in motion which will transform her condition, and in a few months she will be “a sailor’s wife” who “glorie[s]” in her situation (Volume 2, Chapter 12). And the boys at the Cottage—one imagines them stuffed with cake while the servants gossip and flirt—probably enjoy the license of their temporary situation, which Christmas, as we’ve seen, will transform. It doesn’t seem likely that they suffer from the temporary neglect here any more than from the steady neglect by their maternal grandfather. But, like the one-book reading list and the mirrored dressing room and the reduction of meaningful connections to the family member who most resembles that dressing room, this grandparental inertia defines Sir Walter’s character, and shows him failing not only as a paterfamilias—that would mean nothing to him—but as an Elliot. And that would shame even Sir Walter.
Quotations from Austen’s novels are from Mollands.net.
Here are the links to the other guest posts Nora wrote for my blog:
“. . . the snow in Emma is one of those events which provides everyone present with the opportunity to act intensely in character. . . .”
“Pauses: Moments in Jane Austen When Nothing and Everything Gets Said”:
“. . . the ‘pause’ is often a moment when a character is suppressing a laugh, or an angry reply: it stands for a rebellion that does not take place, or takes place only internally.”
[image error]
This is the photo I used last year for the “Emma in the Snow” blog series. I’m including it again here not only because it was the illustration for Nora’s guest post on snow, but because it’s a view of Lake Newell, Alberta, from the spot where my own grandparents built a summer cabin for their family in the 1950s, and thus it seems to me that it’s equally appropriate for a post on grandparents.
November 1, 2016
The Republic of Love Bookmark and the Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth
“Just a love story, people say about a book they happen to be reading, to be caught reading. They smirk or roll their eyes at the mention of love…. It’s possible to speak ironically about romance, but no adult with any sense talks about love’s richness and transcendence, that it actually happens, that it’s happening right now, in the last years of our long, hard, lean, bitter, and promiscuous century. Even here it’s happening, in this flat, midcontinental city with its half million people and its traffic and weather and asphalt parking lots and languishing flower borders and yellow-leafed trees—right here, the miracle of it.” This passage is from The Republic of Love, by Carol Shields, and I expect it probably sounds somewhat familiar to readers of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey:
“Oh! it is only a novel!” replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.—“It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;” or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
“Just a love story”; “only a novel!” The Republic of Love is one of my favourite Carol Shields novels, partly because of the Austen connection, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to visit the Project Bookmark Canada marker for the novel when my family and I spent a day in Winnipeg, Manitoba this past summer (during our road trip “From Halifax to Vancouver and Home Again”). My book club is reading The Republic of Love this month, so I decided this would be a good time to share these photos in a blog post.
The Bookmark is at the corner of River and Osborne, where the heroine, Fay McLeod, often waits in the bus shelter. One of the things Fay loves about Winnipeg is that “You were always running into someone you’d gone to school with or someone whose uncle worked with someone else’s father…. Fay again and again is reassured and comforted to be part of a knowable network.” (Read more about The Republic of Love Bookmark on the Project Bookmark Canada website.)
I love the idea of a “literary TransCanada highway,” as Kristen Den Hartog has described these Bookmarks that stretch from Vancouver, BC to Woody Point, Newfoundland.
We now have one in Nova Scotia: the Bookmark honouring Alistair MacLeod’s novel No Great Mischief was unveiled just over a year ago, in Port Hastings, Cape Breton, and it features a passage from the end of the novel, including the famous last line: “All of us are better when we’re loved.”
I haven’t been to see the No Great Mischief Bookmark yet, even though I live in Nova Scotia—but I’ll get there! That day in Winnipeg, we also visited the Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth.
Thinking about connections between The Republic of Love and Northanger Abbey prompted me to revisit Shields’s biography of Jane Austen this past weekend, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a description of the 1996 Jane Austen Society of North America AGM on the first page. I read the book when it was published in 2001, and while I remember liking the way Shields defends Austen against the charge that she ignored history and politics in her work and the way she analyzes what it meant for Austen to have “a public self after a life that had been austerely private,” I had forgotten many details, including the descriptions of JASNA and, for example, the fact that she refers to Austen’s Mr. Knightley as a “cold potato.” I wonder if that assessment of him has anything to do with the fact that she gave the name “Peter Knightly” to the man her heroine Fay McLeod no longer loves.
If you read last week’s blog post, you’ll know I attended this year’s JASNA AGM in Washington, DC. I started going to JASNA AGMs in 1999, so I wasn’t in Richmond, Virginia to hear the paper Carol Shields and Anne Giardini gave at the 1996 conference. But I think Shields’s description would apply equally to this year’s AGM: she says there is “no attempt to trivialize Jane Austen’s pronouncements and mockingly bring her into our contemporary midst. The gatherings are both gentle in approach and rigorous in scholarship.”
Back in May, I read Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing, edited by Anne Giardini and Nicholas Giardini, and I was thinking of that book as well as The Republic of Love while I walked the paths of the labyrinth in the summer. “I saw that I could become a writer if I paid attention, if I was careful, if I observed the rules, and then, just as carefully, broke them,” Shields says. I like that advice a lot, and I like what she says about ignoring trends: “Think instead of the stories you like to read, or better yet, the story you would like to read but can’t find.”
I’ve been working on a novel for several years now, writing a story that I’d like to read but couldn’t find, and for the next month or so I’m planning to take a break from social media and blogging so I can focus on revisions. The manuscript is at about 125,000 words right now—I need to write some more and then cut quite a bit. For inspiration, I’m going to turn to Jane Austen, who gave her niece Anna this advice about revising her novel: “I hope when you have written a great deal more you will be equal to scratching out some of the past” (9 September 1814).
I’ll also be thinking of Shields’s words about how “creativity flourishes in tranquil settings,” and of advice from another Canadian novelist I admire, Christy Ann Conlin, who wrote a guest post here a few weeks ago about “The Sweet Exhilaration of Solitude” and the value of “slipp[ing] away from screens and social media.” I hear November is a good month for writing novels. See you again in December.
October 28, 2016
Jane Austen’s Emma in Washington, DC
The JASNA AGM in Washington, DC last weekend was absolutely wonderful. I enjoyed spending several days with JASNA members listening to presentations and participating in conversations about Jane Austen and her Emma. I’m grateful to everyone who helped organize “Emma at 200: ‘No One But Herself,’” especially Debra Roush and Linda Slothouber, Conference Coordinators.
On Thursday, Louise West and Mary Guyatt spoke about plans for “The 1817 Bicentenary in England” (Louise West, on the importance of Steventon and Chawton: “it was Hampshire that made Jane”); Sue Dell described the creation and preservation of the quilt sewn by Jane and Cassandra Austen and their mother; Deborah Charlton talked about the archaeological excavation of Steventon Rectory in a session on “Jane Austen’s Birthplace” and quoted James Edward Austen-Leigh, who said that “The most ordinary articles of domestic life are looked on with some interest, if they are brought to light after being long buried”; Gillian Dow gave a virtual tour of “Jane Austen’s Emma at 200: From English Village to Global Appeal” and spoke of Austen’s connections with the wider world through her brothers’ experiences (“although she didn’t travel much herself, she travelled through them”); and Jack Wang offered a behind-the-scenes look at the Cozy Classics board book adaptation of Emma and showed pictures of the felted figures he and his brother Holman created (“This strange alien creature is Mr. Elton before he got his head put on,” he said at one point. I wish I’d taken a picture of Mr. E.). At a luncheon/lecture/performance called “‘I must leave off being young’: Jane Austen in 1816,” Angela Barlow and Hazel Jones (presenting on behalf of Maggie Lane, who was unable to attend the AGM) highlighted the fact that Emma, unlike other Austen heroines, looks forward to what her life will be like when she reaches the age of 40 or 50.
And all of those sessions took place before the conference officially began on Friday afternoon, with Bharat Tandon’s plenary lecture on things that are hidden in plain sight in Emma. “Austen’s astonishing achievement in this novel,” he suggested, “is that fiction and reality each become the other’s visible world.” Susan Allen Ford paid close attention to Robert Martin and Harriet Smith in her plenary session on Saturday, and talked about how Mr. Martin’s “reading allows us to imagine an interior life for him.” At the closing session on Sunday, Juliette Wells described her research on the six surviving copies of the 1816 American edition of Emma (and talked about the annotations in the New York Society library copy, including “Mr. Knightley—tolerable,” “Emma—intolerable,” “Harriet—very pleasant,” and “El[ton]—d____d sneak”).
The view from our hotel room
The top of the Washington Monument, as seen from our hotel room
I loved learning from Cheryl Kinney, Theresa Kenney, and Liz Philosophos Cooper about “Fictive Ills, Invalids, and Healers” in Emma and from Elaine Bander about “‘Liking’ Emma Woodhouse.” (Jane Austen famously said of Emma that she was going to take a heroine “whom no one but myself will much like.”) In my own session, I explored what it means that Emma is described as “faultless in spite of all her faults.” As always, with several breakout sessions scheduled at the same time, it was impossible to hear all of them, and I’m looking forward to reading about sessions I missed when JASNA’s journals Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line are published.
Perhaps some of you who were in Washington last weekend would be willing to comment on this post to share your experiences of the AGM. I missed out on several tours and events as well as breakout sessions. I found myself wishing I had bought a ticket for the candlelight tour of Mount Vernon, for example, and the “Illuminated Washington” tour, and I heard from several people that Friday’s “Salon Concert at Hartfield” by Ensemble Musica Humana was fabulous. (I didn’t have a ticket to the concert and that evening I watched the PBS documentary “Hamilton’s America,” which was also fabulous. No direct connection with Jane Austen—although the musical “Hamilton” is definitely about what it means to be ambitious, and, as many of you know, I’m very interested in the topic of Austen and ambition.)
I enjoyed catching up with the contributors to “Emma in the Snow” who attended the AGM, including Deborah Barnum, Carol Chernega, Gillian Dow, Susannah Fullerton, Theresa Kenney, Cheryl Kinney, Deborah Knuth Klenck, Dan Macey, Paul Savidge, Maggie Sullivan, Kim Wilson, and Deborah Yaffe, and several of us sat together at the banquet on Saturday. Mutton was not on the menu, but we did talk about the recipes Dan included in his wonderful guest post, “Discovering Mutton in Emma.”
I spent most of the weekend in the hotel, but I did get a few photos of Washington. Here’s what I saw on my early morning run on Thursday:
And here’s what I saw on the way back to the hotel after I visited “Will & Jane” at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I missed the curators’ talk by Janine Barchas and Kristina Straub on Wednesday evening, unfortunately, and it was great to have the chance to tour the exhibit on Friday morning (and then catch a ride on this shuttle bus).
The Folger Shakespeare Library
The United States Capitol
The Embassy of Canada
The exhibit includes the famous white shirt worn by Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice mini-series—but that wasn’t my favourite part. (If you’re interested, you can read my thoughts on Mr. Darcy here: “Why is Mr. Darcy So Attractive?”) What I liked best about “Will & Jane” was the opportunity to think of Jane Austen as a playwright and/or an actor, and as the author of novels that continue to inspire others to write plays and screenplays and other creative works. The manuscript of the play “Sir Charles Grandison” was displayed alongside Emma Thompson’s screenplay for the 1995 film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.
Screenplay of Sense and Sensibility
The manuscript of “Sir Charles Grandison,” on loan from Chawton House Library. “No manuscript of a complete Shakespeare play in his handwriting survives, but a play in Austen’s hand does…. While it remains uncertain whether Austen authored this adaptation in whole or in part … it does give us evidence of Austen’s participation in just the type of amateur theatricals that she seems to critique in her fiction.”
This year’s AGM has inspired me to read more about the Austen family’s interest in attending, writing, and performing in plays, to explore the various journeys undertaken by Jane and her siblings, to reread Emma yet again (this time paying more attention to what characters are reading and to what’s visible or invisible), and to continue to think about the ways in which Jane Austen’s life and writings inspire readers to create new works of their own, whether they—or rather, we—are writing essays or fiction or picture books or plays and screenplays, or designing and sewing quilts or period costumes. (I took a few photos of Janeites in costume at the Regency ball on Saturday evening, but they’re a bit blurry, so I won’t include them here. Someday I’ll stop relying on my iPhone for everything and invest in a camera so I can take better photos indoors.)
Reading about Austen’s legacy will be excellent preparation for next year’s JASNA AGM, “Jane Austen in Paradise,” in Huntington Beach, California, which focuses on “how Jane Austen has influenced literary and popular culture, and how she has been reimagined by succeeding generations of Austen scholars and enthusiasts in the 200 years of her ‘afterlife.’”
Next on my reading (and rereading) list, then: Jane Austen and the Theatre, by Paula Byrne; Jane Austen’s Journeys, by Hazel Jones; the Penguin edition of Emma, edited by Juliette Wells (I read Bharat Tandon’s beautifully illustrated Harvard University Press edition when I was preparing my talk for the AGM, but I haven’t read the new Penguin edition yet); The Joy of Jane: Thoughts on the First 200 Years of Austen’s Legacy (essays by Maggie Lane, Deirdre Le Faye, Susannah Fullerton, Ruth Williamson, Carrie Bebris, Emily Brand, Penelope Friday, Amy Patterson, Nigel Starck, Margaret Sullivan, and Kim Wilson), and Among the Janeites, by Deborah Yaffe, because I remember that Deborah talks about the ways in which Jane Austen inspires creativity in her readers.
I’m also partway through rereading Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye, and I’m planning to read Persuasion again soon—along with Brian Southam’s Jane Austen and the Navy and Sheila Kindred’s essays on Charles and Francis Austen and the time they spent in Halifax, Nova Scotia—as I prepare to write two lectures for the June 2017 Jane Austen Society (UK) conference in Halifax. (Sheila and I will be giving a joint lecture on “Charles and Francis: Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers on the Royal Navy’s North American Station” and I’ll also be speaking on “Anne Elliot’s Ambitions.”)
I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that attending a conference devoted to Emma Woodhouse has inspired me to draw up an ambitious reading list….
I think I’ll begin by rereading the Cozy Classics Emma, which is just twelve words long.
October 21, 2016
A New Set of Caps
“You cannot let me go, my babies need me.” Kerry Sinanan has written a guest post about her experience of re-reading Jane Austen’s Emma a few months after she almost died after giving birth to her second daughter. She describes her return to consciousness, her recovery from this traumatic experience, and the connections she began to see between her own life and her research on maternal and newborn health in the eighteenth century. Reading Emma last December, she found herself focusing on Emma as a girl who had lost her mother, and she discovered a new appreciation for the chapter in which Mrs. Weston safely gives birth to baby Anna.
Kerry is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway. She specializes in the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century and she has published on slavery and abolition and gender in the period. Her current projects include completing a book on slave masters and editing a collection of commissioned essays on Jane Austen to celebrate the bicentenaries of her novels.
On this opening day of the JASNA conference devoted to Emma (“Emma at 200: ‘No One But Herself’”), I’m pleased and honoured to introduce Kerry’s very moving guest post on the novel. Here’s a photo of her with her daughters in Galway.
For December 2015 I had organized two Jane Austen treats for myself: one was to attend a conference at Chawton House to celebrate the work of Marilyn Butler, “Marilyn Butler and the War of Ideas.” The other, which I’m sure many of you also planned, was to re-read Emma in the month of its bicentenary. I could not have foreseen how much my life context would inflect the experience of both of these when I planned them. I gave birth on 16th September, 2015 to a beautiful baby girl. As she was my second baby I had known that trying to write and present a conference paper during the first twelve weeks of a baby’s life was going to be a challenge! But the challenge turned out to be far greater than I imagined for, after having a relatively smooth home birth, I suffered a sudden and almost fatal postpartum haemorrhage, losing 3.2 litres of blood in less than an hour. Even in the midst of it I remember thinking that this was a very eighteenth-century thing for my body to do! I had not realized that this is, in fact, a terrifyingly common event today and the leading cause of maternal death worldwide. The World Health Organization states that “In Africa and Asia, where most maternal deaths occur, PPH accounts for more than 30% of all maternal deaths. The proportions of maternal deaths attributable to PPH vary considerably between developed and developing countries, suggesting that deaths from PPH are preventable.”
I am one of the lucky ones and was saved by rapid response paramedics, a large emergency team at the Central Delivery Suite of my local hospital, and the blood donors who supplied the blood for my transfusion. After returning to consciousness I looked into the eyes of the female paramedic who had brought me back. We recognized each other as she had been an English student of mine ten years ago! I said, “You cannot let me go, my babies need me”: it was my one thought. I was reunited with my newborn, held safely by her dad in my absence, just hours after the haemorrhage and we were able to breastfeed successfully (this is not always the case after PPH). We remained pretty much glued to each other for weeks after and she did not lose a single ounce from her birth weight. I wrote my paper for the conference with my baby sleeping in her stretchy sling. Her breathing and heart-beat, right beside my own, helped me to recover from the trauma of what had happened. Alongside the relief at our outcome was deep sorrow for the 127,000 mothers a year who die and for their children left behind because of postpartum haemorrhage. Two million deaths among mothers and newborns occur at the time of birth. Birth is still a high risk event in developing countries, and October is Infant Loss Awareness month. (Care #StealTheseStats).
After the birth, writing my conference paper on Pride and Prejudice and the research I was doing on maternal and newborn health were entirely separate areas for me until I went to Professor Isobel Armstrong’s paper, “Illegitimacy and the Haunting of Jane Austen’s Novels.” She began with a reading of the first paragraphs of the novel and paid particular attention to the wonderful last sentence that upsets the apparently blithe tone:
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection. (Emma, Volume 1, Chapter 1)
Professor Armstrong asked us whose voice this was and emphasized the sibilant “s” sounds running throughout the last sentence. The word “caresses” brings to our imagination the tender and intimate whispers, breaths and touches between mother and child, sounds that had been part of my life for the last twelve weeks. As I listened I felt that Emma’s “indistinct remembrance” of this intimacy would make it something to be yearned for because of its bare tangibility. I imagined Emma as having a trace of a memory of irreplaceable love. In my barely-recovered state, it was all I could do not to burst into tears at the thought of my own little ones almost losing me. George Justice, in his blog post for the series Emma in the Snow, has written movingly about this sentence and, based on his own memory of losing his mother in childhood, concludes, “Emma must have been seven or younger when her mother died” (“Mrs. Woodhouse”). Put in this way, we see Emma’s loss as an enormous trauma for a very young child to have suffered, one with lasting effects.
After the conference I returned to my Christmas re-reading of Emma with a new perspective; given that I had almost left my own newborn and her sister motherless, my over-riding view of Emma now was of a child who had lost her mother. Like my own baby, she was “the youngest of two daughters” and I kept pondering how the opening sentences in fact emphasize this motherlessness, and how Emma is put in a position of responsibility from a young age. This mother is replaced, we are told, by a swift shift in tone created by the clichéd description of Miss Taylor as an “excellent woman.” This is sharp and brisk, halting any moment of indulgence for Emma. The irony of the last words became freshly apparent to me for Miss Taylor falls “little short of a mother in affection.” Emma should not complain! My sense of Emma now was of a young girl who has not been permitted to grieve for she has so many “blessings.” It is true that she and Miss Taylor do love each other but, crucially, with “the intimacy of sisters” (Volume 1, Chapter 1). Emma has a memory of a lost mother who can never be replaced but is obedient to the community around her in feeling herself blessed.
And so, when I came to the account of Mrs. Weston’s own maternity—“Mrs. Weston’s friends were all made happy by her safety” (Emma, Volume 3, Chapter 53)—I felt, anew, the power of Austen’s under-statement. This simple sentence glides over the reality that giving birth is a serious risk and the predominant feeling of Mrs. Weston’s family and friends is anxiety, for she and her baby may not survive. Maternal deaths, as we know, were part of life in the period with approximately 90 out of 10,000 women dying in childbirth (Robert Woods, Death before Birth: Fetal Health and Mortality in Historical Perspective). Infant mortality rates were even higher but evidence shows that fewer babies died as mothers were encouraged to breastfeed in the eighteenth century. The commonplace way in which Emma and her circle must bear with their fears for Mrs. Weston and her baby was shared by Austen and her family. Upon the birth of her nephew, Austen writes to Cassandra, “I have just received a note from James to say that Mary was brought to bed last night, at eleven o’clock, of a fine little boy, and that everything is going on very well. My mother had desired to know nothing of it before it should be all over . . .” (18 November 1798). Austen’s mother indeed knew the risks and could not bear the anxiety of waiting through the birth.
Our narrator subtly tells us that the birth of this baby girl gives Emma an opportunity to heal from grief for her lost mother as she happily imagines the life the child will have with its mother, one without separation. “She had been decided in wishing for a Miss Weston” for a daughter is “never banished from home; and Mrs Weston—no one could doubt that a daughter would be most to her” (Volume 3, Chapter 53). And as the news of Emma’s engagement to Mr. Knightley is made known, the chapter stresses the togetherness and unity of family:
It was a union of the highest promise of felicity in itself, and without one real, rational difficulty to oppose or delay it.
Mrs. Weston, with her baby on her knee, indulging in such reflections as these, was one of the happiest women in the world. If any thing could increase her delight, it was perceiving that the baby would soon have outgrown its first set of caps. (Volume 3, Chapter 53)
I see mother and child nursing here with Mrs. Weston cradling her baby’s head as she supports her. The beauty of this everyday moment belies the seriousness that gives rise to it: Mrs. Weston can see that her baby is growing and thriving and will indeed need its next set of caps. She is there to fit them on her.
Quotations are from the Penguin edition of Emma, edited and with an introduction by Juliette Wells (2015), and the Oxford edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (4th edition, 2011).
