Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 26

Discovering Mutton in Emma: The Quest to Please the Principals’ Palates

Today’s guest post for Emma in the Snow includes three recipes created by Dan Macey of Dantasticfood, and thus we turn from last Friday’s focus on friendship to this week’s focus on food in Jane Austen’s fiction. For this coming Friday, Catherine Morley has written about Mr. Woodhouse’s knowledge of the four humours in relation to his ideas about food. Today, I’m delighted to introduce Dan’s guest post on mutton in Emma.

Dan is a commercial food stylist, recipe developer, and writer about foodways, the study of the cultural, social, and economic practices related to the production and consumption of food. He recently contributed to Savoring Gotham: A Food Lover’s Companion to New York City, which was published in December by Oxford University Press. He sits on the board of the Historic Foodways Society of the Delaware Valley, is a life member of JASNA, and edits Bits & Scraps, the newsletter for JASNA’s Eastern Pennsylvania Region. (He also prepared an amazing and memorable dinner for the Region’s Board members and their spouses when I visited Philadelphia last summer to give a talk on “Austen and Ambition.”) Please let us know if you decide to try one or more of the recipes he includes here.

People find satisfaction in reading Jane Austen for a myriad of reasons. I read Austen for her reliable and disciplined references to the foodways of her time. I am not alone. Food historians often cite Austen as a source. In both her personal letters and novels, Austen’s descriptions of how food was consumed and perceived give unique insights into the diet and dietary customs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Emma contains the most food references of any of her novels and food may be considered as a metaphor for human interdependence, central to the novel (see Jane Austen and Food, by Maggie Lane [1995]). Dinner provides Emma Woodhouse with useful opportunities for matchmaking. In the first chapter, George Knightley admonishes Emma to “invite [Mr. Elton] to dinner … and help him to the best of fish and chicken, but leave him to chuse his own wife.” Luckily for readers, Emma does not heed Knightley’s advice and the novel continues.

One food mentioned three times in the novel is mutton and this is not by chance. In Volume 1, Chapter 13, Emma meets her brother-law Mr. John Knightley and her nephews “hastening home” on Christmas Eve to eat roast mutton and rice pudding. Later that evening a saddle of mutton is served at the Westons’ dinner party. Maggie Lane suggests Miss Bates may be using the word mutton in a generic sense when she insists on telling people how small a slice of mutton Jane Fairfax eats (Volume 2, Chapter 1). Mutton was a very important food in Austen’s time. Inviting someone to take mutton with you was Regency-era slang for an invitation to dine, says Lane. And because mutton was so ubiquitous, it was often used in jest to mean most certainly dining on something better than mutton. It’s sort of like asking someone today, “do you want to grab a burger or something?”

As a culinary professional who researches and recreates historic recipes, I often have to use modern-day techniques to try to reflect the historic background of a recipe, while making it palatable to today’s modern tastes, and to use ingredients that can be found on today’s grocery shelves. But being a cook with a strong interest in history, I am intrigued by just how mutton would have been served and how it would have tasted. My quest was to make mutton good enough to please Emma, her suitor Mr. George Knightley, and her gruel-eating father. Now, of course, this is a tall order since all three, I presume, have quite different tastes and views on food. So, I decided to create a separate mutton recipe for each of them.

But first, I needed to get a taste for mutton, and a little research was required. While the English traditionally think of themselves as a land of beef eaters, “mutton eaters would be more historically correct,” according to Clarissa Dickson Wright in A History of English Food (2011). The story of sheep and mutton is very much part of the history of the United Kingdom, being entwined with the British landscape, its history, wealth, and wellbeing since prehistoric times. Mutton was commonly found in cookbooks of Austen’s time. Recipes for mutton braised, boiled, roasted with cockles or oysters, marinated, and even kebobbed are all found in one of the more popular cookbooks of the day, The London Art of Cookery, by John Farley, published in 1811. “Mutton is undoubtedly the meat most generally used in families,” noted one nineteenth-century cookbook author. Boiled mutton was the easiest and most popular way to prepare it. Boiled mutton in England in the late 1700s was reportedly boring, gray, mealy, chewy and just tolerable. Boiled mutton was endured more than savored, but because it was meat, it was valued for nutrition. For the very poor, mutton was an aspiration. Period cooks tried to enhance the look of the meat by boiling the mutton in a cloth to give it paler, less gray, color. There is, in fact, a cartoon by Lewis Walpole in which a husband proclaims the meat “not fit to eat,” and grumbles, “these are the blessed effects of boiling Mutton in a cloth!”

But even in Austen’s time, good mutton was available at a price and there were delicious ways to prepare it. In fact, Austen was very proud of the quality of meat her father produced at Steventon. A neighbor “gratified us very much yesterday by his praises of my father’s mutton, which they all think the finest that was ever ate” (Jane at Steventon writing to Cassandra at Godmersham, 1 December 1798).

Today, in England, there is a campaign, led by Prince Charles, to get the British to serve mutton—and not lamb—at their dinner tables. The Mutton Renaissance Campaign aims to support British sheep farmers struggling to sell their older animals. His efforts have led to new definitions for mutton in the country. Mutton now is defined as the meat from a sheep more than two years old, aged for two weeks after slaughter by hanging and traceable to a specific farm where it was fed on forage, rather than a high concentration of grain. Mutton is now turning into an artisanal food and reclaiming its place on the British dinner table.

Mutton Shopping in North Philadelphia

Before I was to devise recipes to please our characters, I had to first find the mutton—something not all that easy to locate in United States. Lamb, mutton’s younger version, is most readily available in many supermarkets, but mutton, the meat from older sheep, has fallen out of favor and is nearly impossible to find in any market. There are the standard complaints of its gamey flavor—apparently caused by fatty acid accumulation that comes with age—and a lack of tenderness. While lamb has always been more popular than its older relative, interest in mutton declined further after canned mutton rations were offered to soldiers in World War II. In researching recipes, I learned that most of the mutton produced in the U.S. is either used for dog food or shipped to Latin America to be used for traditional barbequed dishes. Julia Child, in her Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which was published in 1961, noted that “mutton, though much appreciated flavor, is not popular in America and generally must be specifically ordered.” I found that not much has changed since 1961.

After many internet searches and telephone calls to local butchers and meat purveyors—including wholesalers—my shopping finally concluded with a halal butcher in North Philadelphia. The shop, filled with hand-written signs and nestled on a narrow, nondescript street, was patronized mostly by practicing Muslims and a host of Central and South American immigrants looking for a taste of home. Besides mutton, the shop, Al-Baraka, sells goat meat as well as four kinds of live chickens, ducks, and rabbits. Pens of live chickens and fowl are open for families to peruse and their selection will then be slaughtered for them in the rear of the shop while they wait. The market looked as if it could have been right out of the Regency period, with what appeared to be much haggling and discussions about the best types of bird to use for a recipe. I ordered both a leg of mutton, which the butcher sawed (using an actual band saw) into steaks—something not usually done with a leg of lamb—and a shoulder of mutton, which he cut into pieces.

I learned that the mutton was raised in a manner that would meet the strict requirements of the Prince of Wales. “We are committed to providing a fresh and healthy alternative to supermarket meat and poultry,” reads an advertisement for the butcher. “Our livestock comes from local Pennsylvania small farms in New Holland, which are known for producing higher quality beef, lamb, and goat. This is because the livestock is left to graze on grass, rather than grown in large feedlots. This makes the meat organic, as there are no hormones used to increase the rate of growth of the animals, which means a meat that doesn’t just taste better, but is also healthier.” Words that Mr. Woodhouse himself would, I daresay, approve.

So, I had found my mutton. Now, how to prepare it in a manner to please our characters. For Mr. George Knightley—who I assume would also have rushed home, much like his brother, for good mutton—I decided to prepare my mutton steaks using a recipe for Haricot Mutton found in Martha Lloyd’s Household book as a starting point (see A Jane Austen Household Book with Martha Lloyd’s Recipes, by Peggy Hickman [1977]). Martha Lloyd shared a home with Jane, her sister, and her mother first in Southampton and later at Chawton Cottage. Eleven years after Jane’s death, she married Jane’s brother Admiral Francis Austen. She compiled a book of recipes and household hints gathered during her stay with the Austens. The “haricot” here is in reference to the vegetables, which are cut up into pieces—a term borrowed from the French. During Austen’s time, the mutton would likely have been prepared in a large cast iron skillet or pot hanging over an open hearth or nestled on a stand near the fire, so I prepared the Haricot Mutton in a cast-iron, Dutch oven on a gas stove. I added fennel, replacing the originally called-for turnips which are not very popular in my house (recipe below).

A haricot of mutton

Now, what to make for Emma?

While curries are not mentioned in any Austen novel, curries did exist during her time (and there is one reference in her “Lesley Castle”: “the Curry had no seasoning”). The Betty Crocker of the age, Hannah Glasse, includes one in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, which was first published in 1746, but ran to another seventeen editions by the end of the century. It is fair to say that the Austen household likely would have had a copy of Glasse’s book. In fact, many of the recipes found in Martha Lloyd’s cookbook can be traced to Hannah Glasse.

A curry may seem a bit out of place for such an English book, but it is noted by Wright, author of A History of English Food, that two of Glasse’s sons made the journey to the subcontinent when the East India Company was at its zenith, “hugely successful, hugely wealthy and hugely corrupt.”

In fact, we know that Jane Austen’s own aunt Philadelphia had ventured to India and may well have talked of the ready-mixed Indian curry spices that were available in England by 1780. Exotic fruits came to England from the East Indies, including mangoes, which Wright says Jane Austen mentions in her letters. (Wright talks about this on two occasions in A History of English Food, but I haven’t been able to find the letter—do any of you know where the reference is?)

An early advertisement in a London newspaper for “the invaluable rich ingredient” brought to England from the exotic East Indies promoted curry as a great ingredient to make “sumptuous sauces.” The advertisement also hailed curry’s health benefits, including good digestion, good circulation, and a “vigorous” mind, and suggested that it “contributes most of any food to an increase of the human race”—a discreet Regency reference to improved sex life or successful childbirth.

So, a curry—with mangoes—is what I devised for our heroine, who I think would have liked a bit of the exotic (recipe below).

Emma’s mango curry

And so it is Emma’s father, Mr. Woodhouse, I must finally please with mutton. He is known to be a very picky eater worried about too much sugar, salt, and fat. He thought of food more as fuel, I think, than flavor. It is with this in mind that I thought of the current culinary trend of “bone broths.” Simply, it is the process of cooking adding water to meat bones and allowing the water to evaporate and absorb the flavors and nutrients of the bones. While some consider it to be just soup stock, by another name, others note that bone broth is what chefs use to create demi glace, the essence of any good meat sauce. Also, roasting the bones in the oven before boiling them in the water can also produce a richer flavor (recipe below).

“Bone broths are extraordinarily rich in protein, and can be a source of minerals as well,” notes Jennifer McGruther in her cookbook The Nourished Kitchen (2014). “Glycine supports the body’s detoxification process and is used in the synthesis of hemoglobin, bile salts and other naturally-occurring chemicals within the body. Glycine also supports digestion and the secretion of gastric acids. Proline, especially when paired with vitamin C, supports good skin health. Bone broths are also rich in gelatin which may support skin health. Gelatin also supports digestive health.”

Later in life, Jane Austen confessed to her sister that she was relieved to give up her household duties, including some meal planning, which made it possible to concentrate better on her writing: “Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full of Joints of Mutton and doses of rhubarb” (8 September 1816).

Surely my recipes might assist with her concentration.

My Recipes for Mutton to Please These Three

Mr. Knightley’s Mutton Steaks in a Haricot Manner:

Ingredients

4 mutton steaks, about ½ pound each, cut about ½-inch thick

¼ cup flour

2 tablespoons butter

1 onion, diced

3 carrots, diced

3 cups fennel, chopped

1 bay leaf

2 cups vegetable stock

2 cups light white wine

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

Dredge the mutton steaks in the flour and shake off the excess. Set aside.
In a large Dutch oven, melt the butter and begin to sweat the onions and carrots over medium heat. Continue to cook for about 3 minutes. Move the vegetables to the side of the pot and place the dredged steaks in the pot. Brown for about 4 minutes and turn on the other side and brown the other side for another 5 minutes.
Layer the fennel on top of the steaks, add the bay leaf, and pour over the stock, wine and Worcestershire sauce.
Cover, and allow to simmer on low heat for about two hours. Remove the lid and allow to simmer for another 30 minutes, until much of the liquid evaporates and a rich sauce is produced. Served the steaks with the fennel on top.

Emma’s Mutton Curry with Mango:

2 tablespoons butter

1 large onion, diced

3 medium carrots, diced

1 tablespoon curry powder

1 teaspoon cumin powder

1 teaspoon coriander powder

1 teaspoon salt

2 pounds of mutton meat, cut into 1-inch pieces

4 tablespoons Patak’s Dopiaza simmer curry sauce

6 cups chicken broth

1 can coconut milk

1 can chickpeas, drained

2 cups, escarole, shredded

1 mango, diced

2 tablespoons cilantro

In a stock pot, melt the butter. Add the onions and carrots and cook for about 4 minutes, until wilted. Add the spices and toss. Add mutton and toss well to combine with the vegetables and spices. Cook for another 5 minutes until the mutton has changed colors. Add the Dopiaza sauce and coat the meat. Add the chicken broth and simmer for two hours. Remove a piece of the meat to make sure it is tender. Add the coconut milk, chickpeas, and escarole and continue to simmer for another 30 minutes. (Add more water if too thick.) Stir in the mangoes and heat for another 5 minutes. Serve over rice, garnish with cilantro, and top with a dollop of Major Grey’s Chutney.

Mr. Woodhouse’s Mutton Bone Broth:

1 ½ pounds mutton bones (I used a shoulder)

1 onion, cut in half

1 carrot, peeled

½ cup celery leaves

½ cup parsley stems

1 clove garlic

1 teaspoon salt

Place the lamb bones in a stockpot. Pour in about 6-8 cups of water, or enough to cover the bones. Bring to a boil and skim off the scum. Add the remaining ingredients and simmer, partially covered over low heat, for another two hours. Strain the broth through a fine sieve, discarding the bones and vegetables. Let cool at room temperature. Skim off the fat and then reheat and serve … over your favorite gruel.

Quotations are from the Harvard University Press edition of Emma, edited by Bharat Tandon (Cambridge, MA, 2012), and from the fourth edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Lewis Walpole’s 1799 cartoon “A dinner Spoiled” is reproduced in Cooking with Jane Austen, by Kristen Olsen (2005).

Fifth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Catherine Morley, Maggie Arnold, and Mary C.M. Phillips.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

The Challenge of Friendship

Happy New Year, and thank you for celebrating “The Year of Emma” with us!

Emma Claire Sweeney and Emily Midorikawa have been researching and writing about female literary friendship for their blog SomethingRhymed.com, so when I decided to invite them to participate in my Emma in the Snow celebration, I thought I’d ask if they’d co-write a guest post about friendship in Emma. I was very happy that they accepted and it’s a pleasure to share their contribution with you today. This is their first guest post for my blog, though I talked a little bit about them and their research on L.M. Montgomery last spring when I introduced Sue Lange’s guest post on “The Secret Diary of L.M. Montgomery and Nora Lefurgey.” Here’s to friendship and good conversations about books online and in person, throughout 2016 and beyond.

Emma and Emily write literary features both together and separately for several publications, including the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, and The Times. Emily is the winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and Emma’s debut novel, Owl Song at Dawn, will be published this year. Their guest post is written from Emma’s point of view.

That’s Emma on the left and Emily on the right

My friend Emily and I have very different memories of our first encounters with Emma. Emily remembers reading the novel when she was in her late teens, during the Austen craze that swept the nation following the hit BBC series of Pride and Prejudice. This was a book she fondly recollects chatting about with other girls at school.

My experience, on the other hand, was far more solitary. I read it during a family holiday and recall myself at thirteen, curled up on the sofa, studiously ignoring the sounds of my friends cycling across the campsite towards our caravan. I willed the girls to ride past, hoping they’d forget to call for me. I liked them well enough but I couldn’t bear the idea of tearing myself away from my book: a £1 classic paperback version of Emma, which my parents had bought for my birthday—no doubt selected more for the coincidence of the name I share with the novel’s heroine than in expectation that it would appeal to me more than any of Austen’s other books.

When the inevitable knock sounded on the caravan door, I kept my nose deeply buried in my novel and left Mum to speak to my friends. My mother expected me to feel pleased that the girls were inviting me out to play, but I just wanted to continue reading. Although Mum acquiesced to my antisocial choice, I couldn’t help but pick up on her disappointment.

It’s taken me until now to discern the irony of my decision to eschew spending time with those girls for remaining alone with my fictional namesake—a young woman very much in need of a friend.

When Emma Woodhouse’s lifelong confidante and erstwhile governess leaves Hartfield, the estate of her employer, to set up home with a local gentleman Emma attempts to fill the gap by seeking out a replacement friend. But she makes a poor choice in Harriet—a young woman who “knows nothing herself, and looks upon Emma as knowing every thing” (Volume 1, Chapter 5). Indeed, Emma is drawn to her because she shows “so proper and becoming a deference, seeming so pleasantly grateful for being admitted to Hartfield” (Volume 1, Chapter 3). On first glance, we might worry that there’s snobbery at play here: are we being asked to criticise a friendship because it transgresses class lines?

Harriet’s lower social status is an issue, as is her lack of intellect. But these factors primarily pose problems because Emma exploits the power difference. She meddles in Harriet’s love life, for example, convincing her new friend to reject the proposal of the loving farmer Robert Martin by persuading Harriet that he is too lowly. Without a firm friend to challenge her, Emma’s worst excesses of vanity and snobbery are allowed to hold sway.

It is hardly surprising that Emma chose for herself such an unchallenging companion, since the early relationship with her doting governess offered just such a template. Emma’s formative bond with Mrs. Weston can, in part, be held to blame for the growth of her most negative character traits. The governess submitted her own will to that of her charge, and “the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint” (Volume 1, Chapter 1).

Mrs. Weston’s fault is entirely forgivable and yet nonetheless damaging: the magnitude of her love for the motherless Emma has blinded her to her charge’s flaws. And here too, class plays its part. The governess and later companion is assigned an almost impossible task. She must teach Emma to better herself and yet she lacks the equity that could help her to do so with authority and ease.

During her years as a governess, Mrs. Weston failed to convince Emma to stick with skills for long enough to hone them. When we meet the novel’s heroine as an adult she has begun many books but finished few, and her piano playing is adept but hardly accomplished. And yet Austen has dared to present us with a complex character. Emma is not simply over-indulged and self-entitled, she is also, at times, generous-spirited and selfless. She shows herself at her best when it comes to Mrs. Weston. Emma’s father continually bemoans the absence of the household’s former governess, yet Emma rises above her feelings of loss to celebrate her companion’s choice to marry and set up a life of her own. So, while Mrs. Weston’s love may have allowed Emma’s flaws to thrive, it also helped her strengths to flourish.

Emma could perhaps have exploited her strengths and minimised her flaws had she chosen Jane Fairfax to fill the space left in her life by Mrs. Weston’s marriage. Emma’s nearest and dearest consider this niece of their neighbour “so very accomplished and superior” (Volume 1, Chapter 12) that they cannot understand why Emma has not befriended her. Jane is a talented pianist and a well-educated young woman, who has learnt the joys that come from endurance; a motherless woman, who, unlike Emma, has grown up knowing that one day she must fend for herself as a governess. But Emma cannot open herself up to such a friendship, which would expose her own laziness and sense of entitlement, challenging her to better herself.

The presentation copies of Emma that Jane Austen sent to Anne Sharp

From the research my friend Emily and I have done for our website, SomethingRhymed.com, we’ve discovered that Austen herself was brave enough to make just such a choice. In her own life, Austen befriended Anne Sharp—her niece’s governess, who penned plays in between teaching lessons. The pair forged a relationship founded on intellectual parity. Even once Austen’s writing began gaining admirers as grand as the Prince Regent, Sharp never shied away from critiquing her friend’s work. Austen recorded in her notebook that Anne found Jane Fairfax insufficiently well characterised—a telling criticism from a working governess. Austen clearly valued her friend’s capacity to challenge her: she singled out the governess as her only friend to receive one of her precious presentation copies of Emma, and, just two years later, knowing that she was dying, Austen wrote one of her last letters to her “dearest Anne.”

Austen’s notes on the feedback she received on Emma, including Sharp’s criticism of Jane Fairfax

When Sarah challenged me to write about female friendship in Emma as part of her online celebrations to mark the bicentenary of its publication, she didn’t just single me out. Rather, she asked me to reflect on this theme with my friend and co-writer Emily, and our post would set up in conversation with those written by lots of Jane Austen experts and fans.

And so, over twenty years since I turned away my friends in favour of befriending Emma on the page, it’s been female collaboration and camaraderie that have now drawn me back into the novel, transforming the solitary act of reading it into a communal celebration of friendship.

Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Emma, edited by R.W. Chapman (1933).

In conjunction with this guest post for my blog series, Emily interviewed Emma about romantic love and platonic friendship in Austen’s Emma, and the podcast is available beginning today at SomethingRhymed.com. Here’s the link to their conversation.

Fourth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Dan Macey, Catherine Morley, and Maggie Arnold.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

A foggy New Year’s Eve in Nova Scotia

The Long and the Short of It

Deborah Knuth Klenck teaches classes on Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and other writers at Colgate University, where she is Professor of English, and she has spoken at several JASNA AGMs and regional meetings. Members of our JASNA Nova Scotia Region were delighted to hear her talk last May on “Learning to Read with Emma,” and I was especially pleased to host the event at my house.

A couple of weeks before the talk, she wrote a guest post for my blog on reading and rereading Emma with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Today I’m happy to share with you her guest post for Emma in the Snow, on long and short speeches in the novel and what they tell us about Austen’s characters.

Nova Scotia in the snow (and fog). After mild weather last week, we now have cold temperatures and quite a bit of snow in Halifax. This is what the waterfront looked like yesterday afternoon. “The Wave” sculpture next to the Visitor Information Centre at Sackville Landing is by Donna Hiebert.

I’ve been studying (in all her novels) how Jane Austen’s characters’ verbal style identifies who is right-thinking and who is wrong-headed—and sometimes even simply who is morally good or bad. In Emma, the most egregious examples of bad speech—diction, tone, and the like—are Mrs. Elton’s, of course. (Emma herself is not immune to errors of diction, like her pompous categorization of Robert Martin as one of “the yeomanry.” And, while she pounces upon Mrs. Elton for patronizing Jane Fairfax by using her Christian name, she never seems to consider how she herself addresses Harriet.)

But Sarah’s title for this blog series sent me straight to the snow, for a different aspect of bad taste in language: I’ll save diction (and the gender confusion of “cara sposo”) for another time.

The snowy episode of the Westons’ Christmas Eve party offers in a miniature dialogue a perfect example of how verbal style reveals character.

“Your father will not be easy; why do you not go?”

“I am ready if the others are.”

“Shall I ring the bell?”

“Yes, do.”  (Volume 1, Chapter 15)

This terse exchange between Mr. Knightley and Emma shows their down-to-earth, no-nonsense relationship. They use no superfluous syllables. In fact, the perfect mutual understanding in these short speeches virtually announces that these characters are destined to marry. (The inaugural guest post in this series, by Nora Bartlett, draws the same conclusion from this “frank, intelligent, mutually confiding, mutually reliant exchange: no ‘he said,’ ‘she said,’ on the author’s part, no demurring and no hesitation on the characters’—here, these two are calmly decisive amidst all the confusion; they are co-operating, they are equal.”)

It so happens that Emma’s next conversation takes place in the John Knightleys’ carriage—with Mr. Elton, who is, of course

availing himself of the precious opportunity, declaring sentiments which must be already known, hoping—fearing—adoring—ready to die if she refused him; but flattering himself that his ardent attachment and unequalled love and unexampled passion could not fail of having some effect, and in short, very much resolved on being seriously accepted as soon as possible.

Emma “tried to stop him; but vainly; he would go on and say it all.” As soon as she can get a word in edgeways, she tries again to stem the tide of eloquence: “Command yourself to say no more, and I will endeavor to forget it.”

But he won’t.

In Austen’s free-indirect rendering of his speech, Mr. Elton has used almost every extant cliché in the stock vocabulary of marriage proposals—he has carefully prepared (“exactly so!”) this banal speech and is determined to get to the end.

Compare Mr. Knightley:

“I cannot make speeches, Emma:”—he soon resumed; and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing.—“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am.—You hear nothing but the truth from me.—” (Volume 3, Chapter 13)

If Mrs. Elton were here and could assess the difference between these two proposals the way I do, she might offer one of her habitual hackneyed expressions, a saying first used by the writer Mrs. Elton would certainly call “The Bard”: “Brevity is the soul of wit” (Hamlet 2.3.90).

(Alas, though: this is one cliché Mrs. Elton fails to live by.)

Brevity in speech or writing is one of the most reliable distinguishing characteristics of Jane Austen’s unequivocally good characters. Here’s another example: when Harriet hands Emma Mr. Martin’s letter proposing marriage,

She read, and was surprised. The style of the letter was much above her expectation. There were not merely no grammatical errors, but as a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman; the language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling. (Volume I, Chapter 7)

Having waited around—I imagine her hopping from one leg to the other—for Emma to finish, Harriet anxiously inquires, “Is it a good letter? Or is it too short?”

Of course, this scene is not Emma’s finest hour. She does what she can to dampen her own undeniable judgment that Robert Martin’s proposal is “a very good letter.” She needs to bolster her fiction that Mr. Martin is beneath Harriet by suggesting that, “one of his sisters must have helped him” write it. This explanation comes from another fiction, that the Martin girls have had “a superior education” to their brother’s (Volume 1, Chapter 4). But the narrative voice, with ironical litotes, has already described Mrs. Goddard’s school as a place whose alumnae emerge “without any danger of coming back prodigies” (Volume 1, Chapter 3). And Emma never contradicts Mr. Knightley’s assessment that Harriet has “been taught nothing useful” in the course of her “very indifferent education” (Volume 1, Chapter 8). Nevertheless, it suits Emma’s string of falsehoods to claim that Mr. Martin’s plain-spoken proposal has been ghost-written.

Convinced by Emma’s lies, Harriet closes out the episode with the flat observation, “it is but a short letter too.” Of course, though “Emma fe[els] the bad taste of her friend, [she] let[s] it pass with a ‘very true ’” (Volume 1, Chapter 7).

The complement to this scene is not long in coming. Harriet’s next bit of literary criticism concerns Mr. Elton’s charade. “I think it is, without exception, the best charade I ever read. . . . It is as long again as almost all we have had before.”

Oops: wrong again. Emma understates the case: “I do not consider its length as particularly in its favour. Such things in general cannot be too short.” Emma has lapsed into truth-telling for once, but “Harriet was too intent on the lines to hear.” She is busy putting together what may be the only independent thought she utters in the whole novel:

“It is one thing,” said she presently—her cheeks in a glow—“to have very good sense in common way, like every body else, and if there is any thing to say, to sit down and write a letter, and say just what you must, in a short way; and another, to write verses and charades like this” (Volume 1, Chapter 9).

Harriet has recognized an important difference between discourses, but of course her assessment is upside-down.

Volubility is not always a dangerous characteristic, though it can certainly be an annoying one. (In my opinion, Miss Bates’s good will in her gossippings exempts her from criticism: and her apparently disorganized ramblings often reveal a shrewd insight or two—as when she lets it drop that she and Mrs. Cole had guessed that Mr. Elton was courting Emma, long before Emma has come to this mortifying discovery herself.) But think of the brilliant, comical conversation between Mr. Weston and Mrs. Elton in Volume 2, Chapter 18: Mr. Weston is as determined to talk about Frank as Mrs. Elton is to talk about herself and Hymen’s saffron robe—but her fit of coughing gives him an advantage.

Perhaps it’s an inherited characteristic that Frank’s letters are as long as his father’s speeches. “What a letter the man writes!” Mr. Knightley observes of the expository epistle that makes up Volume 3, Chapters 14 and 15. And, although I had always thought that the stream-of-consciousness paragraph that punctuates the strawberry picking in Volume 3, Chapter 6 reflects a collective conversation, I’m coming around to the idea, held by the redoubtable John Mullan, that the 131 words transcribe a monologue all Mrs. Elton’s own.

Emma has certainly committed rhetorical shortcomings in the novel. Verbosity is not generally her worst offense (though holding her tongue on Box Hill would have been a good idea). Nevertheless, by the novel’s end, she has certainly learned such an elegant restraint that she barely speaks at all, despite the occasion:

—What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. –She said enough to show that there need not be despair—and to invite him to say more himself. (Volume 3, Chapter 13)

All quotations are from the Cambridge Edition of Emma, edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (2005).

Third in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Emily Midorikawa, Emma Claire Sweeney, Dan Macey, and Catherine Morley.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

 

Emma’s Regency Christmas

Merry Christmas! Welcome to the second guest post in my Emma in the Snow series. I’m delighted to share with you Theresa Kenney’s survey of Christmas celebrations in Jane Austen’s time and her discussion of Christmas themes in Emma.

Theresa is a graduate of Penn State, Notre Dame, and Stanford. She’s an Associate Professor of English at the University of Dallas and former chair of the department. Her publications include Women Are Not Human: An Anonymous Treatise and Responses, The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, “‘And I am changed also’: Mr. Knightley’s Conversion to Amiability,” and several other essays on Austen, Dickens, Bronte, John Donne, and Robert Southwell. She and her husband have two daughters, Annamaria and Stella. Theresa tells me both girls “love the Cozy Classics Emma, which has long been Stella’s favorite novel. She is two.”

(Like Theresa’s daughters, I’m a fan of the Cozy Classics Austen adaptations. I wrote about their Emma a couple of years ago.)

Last year, Theresa wrote a guest post on “Why Tom Bertram Cannot Die” for the celebration I hosted in honour of Mansfield Park. That post also includes an account of how she discovered Austen’s novels, and how she fell in love “with Austen’s bad characters and their self-congratulatory way of speaking.” 

Best wishes to all of you for a happy holiday season! Thank you for celebrating 200 years of Emma with us, and I hope you enjoy reading Theresa’s piece on “Emma’s Regency Christmas.”

England was merry England, when

Old Christmas brought his sports again.

’Twas Christmas broached his mightiest ale;

’Twas Christmas told the merriest tale.

— Sir Walter Scott, Marmion

Christmas in Austen’s Time

How did Emma celebrate Christmas? Many, thinking of Sir Walter Scott’s nostalgic regret for medieval Christmas quoted above (from Marmion, which Austen knew well), think there was not much merrymaking in early 19th century England. Poet Henry Vaughan lamented how dire the Puritan suppression of the feast was in his 1650 “Christmas: How Kind is Heaven to Man”:

Can neither Love, nor sufferings bind?

Are we all stone, and earth?

Neither His bloody passions mind,

Nor one day bless His birth?

Alas, my God! Thy birth now here

Must not be numbered in the year.

During the Interregnum, churches were even locked up on Christmas Day to prevent liturgical celebrations, and ordinary homes were policed so Cromwell’s men could confiscate meat pies, roast fowl, Yule logs, sweets, and Christmas puddings. Thomas Lewis, in his sarcastic 1720 work English Presbyterian Eloquence, states of Puritan attacks on Christmas continuing after the Restoration, “Under the censure of lewd customs they include all sorts of public sports, exercises, and recreations, how innocent soever. Nay, the poor rosemary and bays, and Christmas pie is made an abomination.”

Emma, however, probably would have eaten many of the same foods and enjoyed many of the same festive customs her forbears had known. Many time-honored Christmas customs still prevailed in English homes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The house probably would have been decorated with the traditional greenery Lewis mentions—rosemary and bay, as well as holly and ivy—although Emma would very likely not have had a Christmas tree. Because the John Knightleys are visiting with their children, however, a tree is nonetheless a remote possibility: these had already been introduced into England by Queen Charlotte, and Coleridge commented on those he saw in his European tour. Alison Barnes notes the spread of Christmas trees to many of the upper class families of England in the early 1800’s, especially those with children in the household. But Mr. Woodhouse, of course, would never have permitted a tree with candles and paper ornaments near his boisterous grandchildren!

Emma, like her author, would normally have gone to church, whether or not Christmas fell on a Sunday, which it does not in the novel’s calendar; Austen says Emma is prevented from attending by the heavy snow on Christmas Eve. Emma breathes a sigh of relief; she will not need to confront Mr. Elton or Harriet, both of whom would cause her deep embarrassment:

These were very cheering thoughts; and the sight of a great deal of snow on the ground did her further service, for any thing was welcome that might justify their all three being quite asunder at present.

The weather was most favourable for her; though Christmas-day, she could not go to church. Mr. Woodhouse would have been miserable had his daughter attempted it, and she was therefore safe from either exciting or receiving unpleasant and most unsuitable ideas. The ground covered with snow, and the atmosphere in that unsettled state between frost and thaw, which is of all others the most unfriendly for exercise, every morning beginning in rain or snow, and every evening setting in to freeze, she was for many days a most honourable prisoner. No intercourse with Harriet possible but by note; no church for her on Sunday any more than on Christmas-day; and no need to find excuses for Mr. Elton’s absenting himself. (Chapter 16)

If Emma had been able to go to the Christmas service, she would not have sung Christmas carols there. Not until 1820 was the ban on non-biblical hymn singing in church lifted. She could not have heard or sung “Silent Night” (1818, Mohr, Catholic priest), “O Little Town of Bethlehem” (1868, Brooks, Episcopalian minister), “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” (1849, Sears, Unitarian minister), or “O Holy Night” (1843, Cappeau, anticlerical atheist). Among the few Christmas songs familiar to a modern audience that Austen might have known, from celebrations outside church, are “O Come, All Ye Faithful” (Wade 1751, Catholic layman, probably translating a text by Catholic King John Of Portugal, ca. 1640), “Whilst Shepherds Watched Their Flocks” (Tate, Puritan dramatist, 1700) and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” (C. Wesley, Methodist minister, 1739, though the original melody was not the Mendelssohn melody used today). (See Daniel Pyle and Rebecca H. Jamison for more on carols.)

Sir Walter Scott refers to Yule logs, festive greenery, singing, and mumming as part of Christmas celebrations of old, in a passage Jane Austen would have read in Marmion (her famous comment about “dull elves” is an emended quotation from this work). Would Austen and her Emma have had Yule logs? Although they were probably brought in with less ceremony than of yore, and their lighting and extinction attended by fewer superstitious speculations about good fortune and deaths in the new year, the Yule log certainly appeared in the form of spectacular Christmas fires, a detail Austen notes especially when referring to Christmases in the novels: at the Box Hill picnic, Mrs. Elton speaks of stories being told by the fireside at Christmas; in Chapter 14 of Persuasion, Austen speaks of the “roaring Christmas fire” at the Musgroves’, where we also find the girls cutting up gold paper and silk and the boys holding “high revel” as the table “bends under the weight” of brawn and pies. Like the Musgroves, Mr. Woodhouse is a host in the old style, however much he warns his guests against eating the food he provides. His Christmas tables would have been generous affairs, and Mr. Elton’s drunkenness assures us that “Mr. Weston’s good wine” had flowed liberally at Randalls, emboldening the curate to bestow upon Emma the unfortunate Christmas gift of a Dreadful Proposal in the carriage on the way home.

Emma probably would have drunk spiced wine herself, and eaten meat and mince pies (condemned by special provision by the Puritan government but reintroduced after the Restoration). Austen’s brother Edward’s family enjoyed a Twelfth Night celebration in 1809, so it is safe to assume the feasting at Randalls and Hartfield lasted the full twelve days of Christmas, even if John and Isabella left as soon as the roads were passable.

The crèche scene so universally known nowadays had not been a normal part of English Christmas decorations even before the Reformation (in fact, the figure of Baby Jesus, if present at all, was usually molded of bread and occupied the top of the mince pie, which before Cromwell’s reign, was shaped like a manger bed. Baby Jesus never came back, even after the Restoration). Emma would not set up a stable with figures of the Holy Family and shepherds. Nor would she set candles in the windows, an Irish custom, and no doubt she would never have heard of luminarias, poinsettias, or las posadas.

The Importance of Christmas Themes in Emma: Dangerous Games

Austen sets up the calendar of Emma carefully to (among other things) bring Jane Fairfax to Highbury in November and John and Isabella Knightley to Hartfield in December for the Christmas festivities. Jo Modert and Ellen Moody have worked out the timeline of Emma and shown that it revolves around the cycle of the year, and in particular that it emphasizes certain periods of the liturgical year. Christmas is not just important as a marker of temporal flow, however: it has a persistent if subtle presence through the novel. There are six mentions of Christmas in Emma. There are actually more—seven—in Mansfield Park, most of them associated with Edmund’s taking orders then. Among these is Mary Crawford’s important question to Fanny about Edmund’s prolonged stay in Peterborough: “Is it Christmas gaieties that he is staying for?” in Chapter 29. When Mary Crawford speaks of Edmund’s staying with the Owens family for Christmas gaieties, it is because the feast lasted through the twelve days of Christmas in Austen’s day, just as it had before Cromwell. As mentioned above, we know from an 1809 letter from her niece, Fanny Knight, that Austen’s family celebrated up through Epiphany:

… after Dessert Aunt Louisa who was the only person to know the characters … took one by one out of the room and equipped them, put them into separate rooms and lastly dressed herself. We were all conducted into the library and performed our different parts. Papa and the little ones from Lizzy downwards knew nothing of it and it was so well managed that none of the characters knew one another … Aunt Louisa and L. Deeds were Dominos; F. Cage, Frederica Flirt (which she did excellently); M. Deeds, Orange Woman; Mama, Shepherdess; Self Fortune Teller; Edward, beau; G, Irish Postboy; Henry Watchman; William, Harlequin; we had such frightful masks that it was enough to kill one with laughing at putting them on and altogether it went off very well and quite answered our expectations.

This letter highlights important activities associated with Christmas: masking and game playing. Among the mentions of Christmas in Emma, the most important is probably Mrs. Elton’s dismissal of the dangerous, subversive games that Frank Churchill proposes in midsummer on Box Hill:

I had an acrostic once sent to me upon my own name, which I was not at all pleased with. I knew who it came from. An abominable puppy!—You know who I mean—(nodding to her husband). These kind of things are very well at Christmas, when one is sitting round the fire; but quite out of place, in my opinion, when one is exploring about the country in summer. Miss Woodhouse must excuse me. I am not one of those who have witty things at every body’s service. (Chapter 43)

There is clearly something unseasonable about the games Frank proposes in the height of the summer heat, and as a displaced lord of misrule he encourages the atmosphere that leads to Emma’s greatest trespass in the novel, which is a casual and cruel reinforcement of social status, the opposite of the social reversals known to accompany Christmas games under the auspices of the rulers themselves. We would not expect to look for wisdom in Mrs. Elton, but she seems to be right, that the safe and convivial fireside of Christmastime somehow would make game playing a more secure and amicable activity than it is in midsummer on Box Hill.

Austen may even be thinking of Christmas games when in the June after the first Christmas, Frank, Emma, Harriet, and Jane play the alphabet game left behind from the children’s visit. Austen records that Frank says it is “a dull looking evening, that ought to be treated rather as winter than summer” (Chapter 41).

Even Christmas activities at Christmastime seem fraught with danger in Emma, as Emma’s subjection to Mr. Elton’s drunken proposal makes clear. Does Austen’s attitude toward the feast align with Mrs. Elton’s, since the playing of games of wit, charades, and puzzles are deployed throughout Emma as deceptions and underhanded mockeries of others? There is a distrust of parties and sport and game that certainly bespeaks the opposite of the merry old England Sir Walter Scott celebrates, and that aligns Emma’s creator with the severity of a Fanny Price and an Edmund Bertram when it comes to acting and playing parts. Does Emma even care about Christmas celebrations? She does not lament being forced to stay home from church; the reader must also acknowledge that if John Knightley’s advice had been followed, they never would have gone to Randalls that night and Emma would not have been offended by Mr. Elton; if no one had played any games, Jane and Miss Bates might not have had their feelings hurt and their dignity offended. As Emma sums up in reflecting upon the past in her embarrassed first visit to the parsonage after Mrs. Elton’s arrival: “A thousand vexatious thoughts would recur. Compliments, charades, and horrible blunders” (Chapter 32).

But one thing is sure: after their October wedding and trip to the sea, the next Christmas will see Mr. and Mrs. Knightley ensconced by their first Christmas fire as a couple, at Hartfield. The very hearth from which Mr. Knightley fled the night he confronted Emma over the taunting of Jane in the letterbox game, that “fire which Mr. Woodhouse’s tender habits required almost every evening throughout the year,” will replace with its festive, familial warmth “the coolness and solitude of Donwell Abbey” (Chapter 41).

Sources

Austen, Jane. Emma. 3rd edition. Ed. R. W. Chapman. London: OUP, 1933.

—. Emma: An Annotated Edition. Ed. Bharat Tandon. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012.

Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. W. Strahan, 1784.

Hampson, RT. Medii Aevi Calendarium or Dates, Charters, and Customs of the Middle Ages, with Kalendars from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century. London: H.K. Causton and Son, 1841.

Johnson, Kevin Orlin. Why Do Catholics Do That? New York: Random House, 1994.

Knight, Fanny. Letter 1809 CKS U951 C107/2. Fanny Knight’s diaries are deposited in the Centre for Kentish Studies (CKS), Maidstone, and all rights belong to the Knatchbull Family Archives.

Lewis, Thomas. English Presbyterian Eloquence. London: T. Bickerton, 1720.

Stoyle, Mark. “No Christmas Under Cromwell?”

Scott, Sir Walter. Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Company, 1808.

Timbs, John. Something for Everybody (And a Garland for the Year). London: Lockwood and Co., 1861.

Vaughan. Henry. Silex Scintillans: or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. London: Blackie and Son, 1650.

Wakefield, Julie. “Jane Austen and Christmas: Celebrating Twelfth Night.”

Second in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Dan Macey, Emily Midorikawa, Emma Claire Sweeney, and Deborah Knuth Klenck.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Emma in the Snow

Jane Austen’s Emma was published 200 years ago today, on December 23, 1815, and I hope you’ll join the anniversary celebrations here on my blog this winter as we celebrate “Emma in the Snow.” Here’s your invitation to the party and here’s the full list of contributors. Happy 200th to Emma, and welcome, dear readers, to this online conversation about the novel and its heroine, “faultless in spite of all her faults.” I’m glad you’re here!

Last winter, Nora Bartlett and I wrote several letters to each other about Jane Austen, the weather in Austen’s novels, and the weather in Nova Scotia as compared with the weather in Scotland. (I suppose technically they were emails, but the length and the nature of Nora’s wonderful messages has made it seem more like a real, old-fashioned exchange of letters.) Nora was born in upstate New York but left North America for a Junior Year Abroad at the University of Oxford and has since spent most of her adult life in Scotland, where she has taught part-time for more than twenty years in the School of English at St. Andrews University and has worked with adults in a variety of Lifelong Learning programs.  She’s currently writing a book about silence and listening in Jane Austen’s fiction, and on Valentine’s Day this year she wrote about “Pauses: Moments in Jane Austen When Nothing and Everything Gets Said” for my blog.

I’m grateful to Nora for writing this first post on winter weather for my Emma series, for letting me use the mellifluous title of her post for the series as a whole, and for sympathizing with the massive snowfall we experienced here in Nova Scotia last winter. I’m really hoping the weather this coming winter won’t be too bad in my neighbourhood or yours, but if we do get “weather which might fairly confine every body at home” (Emma, Chapter 16), at least we can meet up on the internet to talk about Jane Austen.

And if the weather is reasonably pleasant, I hope to get outside to take some pictures of snow. We haven’t had very much snow in Halifax so far this year (and I haven’t visited the English countryside recently), but I spent most of last week in Alberta, where there was plenty of snow—thus my photo for Emma in the Snow is from southern Alberta. (Also, I like the way the tree branches against the blue sky in this photo resemble the branches in the banner photo I’ve used on my blog for the past few years.)

Here’s what Nora has to say about the snow in Emma.

Those who wrongly categorize Jane Austen as a writer with a narrow compass—“a few families in a village,” as she teasingly said of herself—must have failed to notice the significance in her novels of the global phenomenon that is the weather. What reader has not shuddered over the prospect of a “wet Sunday evening” at Mansfield Park, like the one evoked in Chapter 47, even more perhaps than at the confession to Fanny that takes place that night, of the details of Edmund’s final sad interview with Mary Crawford? And all of Elizabeth Bennet’s many admirers will have delighted in her “crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles” to arrive at Netherfield—“her petticoat, six inches deep in mud”—on her errand of mercy to sister Jane.

But it is in Emma that the weather is allowed to make the most difference to people’s behavior: consider the hot day at Donwell in Chapter 42 which renders Mrs. Elton speechless and brings out Frank Churchill’s wicked temper, or the following day at Box Hill where perfect weather wreaks almost universal wretchedness and havoc. And is it not just hearing about the high wind at a water party at Weymouth that starts that “very dear part of Emma, her fancy” speculating on Jane Fairfax’s relationship with Mr. Dixon—while in fact it may have been that same sudden blast of wind, that dramatic rescue, that originally directed the wayward eye of Frank Churchill toward the lowly Miss Fairfax?

Like most of Jane Austen’s novels, Emma has a central action which unfolds over about a year, and therefore takes its characters through a winter: Northanger Abbey’s action is the most compressed, and nearly misses winter out, beginning after the Christmas holidays which introduced James Morland to the Thorpes, but in Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion the action begins in the autumn and covers much of the ensuing year; Mansfield Park’s main action begins with the summer arrival of the Crawfords at Mansfield Parsonage, but continues for almost a year, including of course the Christmas when Edmund is ordained. So, all the novels have some winter chapters.

But only Emma has a snowfall. In Mansfield Park a little “snow on the ground” causes cold and inconvenience, and, similarly, Jane Austen’s letters mention snow from time to time, usually unenthusiastically: but that may be because she seems often to be in a city when it is snowing, so that by snow she must most often mean slush. But perhaps she just did not like it—the combination of impassable roads and impractical garments—think how often a moment in one of her novels turns on who has the thickest boots, or whether the ground is unsuitable for ladies’ shoes.

But as a snow-loving North American deprived of my birthright by living in Britain—where it really does not snow nearly enough—I have always treasured the snowfall in Chapter 15 of Emma, which endangers no one’s safety, despite Mr. Woodhouse’s fears, but threatens everyone’s equanimity: at the news that snow has fallen while the party from Hartfield is having an unwonted evening out at Randalls, “everybody had something to say”—most of it absurd.

We should not forget, though, that this tense chapter in which snow falls, threatening to overturn carriages, and keep Mr. Woodhouse from his dish of gruel and his elder daughter from her children, this chilly chapter begins and ends with the heat emanating from the amorous Mr. Elton. His overindulgence in “Mr. Weston’s good wine” first “elevates his spirits” so that his attentions to Emma—attentions the reader has understood, while Emma has refused to recognize them—these attentions breathily, vinously increase, “surprising” Mrs. Weston and alarming Emma even before the announcement of snow produces a general atmosphere of alarm. His over-indulgence, once the carriages are in motion and he is alone with Emma, will lead Mr. Elton as the chapter moves to a climax, to “seize her hand . . . making violent love to her”; though her contemptuous rejection sobers him up fast, so that the last image we have of this ill-starred pair is of them sitting in the burning silence of “mutually deep mortification” as the carriage inches its way toward Hartfield through the snow.  So the snow panic, my main interest here, is bookended by segments of one of the great drunk scenes in literature—again, this is an experiment Jane Austen does not attempt again in her mature fiction. What is it about Chapter 15?

The main action is set, as is that of the preceding chapter, at Randalls, the Westons’ house, and focuses less on Mr. Elton than on the young Knightleys, on Mr. Woodhouse and his daughter—and on Mr. Knightley. John Knightley, the younger brother, the London lawyer, cool, clever, not-entirely-amiable and distinctly unsociable, is spending an evening out under duress, a constraint which affects most of the Hartfield family: Isabella, John’s sweet-natured wife, is never very willing to be separated from her children; Mr. Woodhouse prefers to have no break or variation in his routine. This party, an opportunity for the newlywed Westons to offer hospitality at Christmastime to their oldest and dearest friends, has been achieved by Mr. Weston’s sociability working alongside Emma’s gift for events management.

As the chapter opens it is getting late, and Mr. Woodhouse, whose postprandial tendency is to withdraw along with the ladies rather than to remain at table with the gentlemen, is already “quite ready to go home” when Mr. John Knightley floors the assembly “with the information of the ground being covered with snow, and of its still snowing fast, with a strong drifting wind.” We have already learned that when he loses patience with his father-in-law’s anxieties, John Knightley expresses that impatience with sarcasm: “I dare say we shall get home very well . . . I dare say we shall all be safe at Hartfield before midnight.” He imparts this with what the narrative wryly terms “a very unfeeling triumph”: not at all a heartless man, as we learn from his kindness to Jane Fairfax later in the novel, John Knightley can be rendered almost savage by his father-in-law’s dithering—probably because he cannot help but recognize that Mr. Woodhouse’s great virtue, his gentleness, is one he himself lacks.

But the snow in Emma is one of those events which provides everyone present with the opportunity to act intensely in character: as John Knightley waxes ever more sardonic, and his wife more passionately and absurdly maternal—“the horror of being blocked up at Randalls, while her children were (a half-mile away) at Hartfield”—Mr. Weston becomes ever more affable and convivial, Mrs. Weston more comforting and kind, Mr. Woodhouse more anxious and nervous, and more dependent on Emma. “What is to be done, my dear Emma? . . . what is to be done?”

But it is the elder Mr. Knightley, who is like his younger brother in “penetration,” but unlike him in forbearance with others’ weakness, whose sterling characteristics jump to life here, as he behaves quickly and calmly—and kindly: and it is so low-key as to be almost invisible. Having “left the room immediately after his brother’s first report of the snow,” while the others were fretting and fussing and worrying each other, he has walked out by himself along the Highbury Road—and, in his report back, the rumored snow, with all its terrors, becomes the real snow, “nowhere above half an inch deep.” He has spoken to the coachmen, which no one else has thought of doing, despite the fact that this is the single Jane Austen novel in which a coachman (James) attains something like the status of a character. And the two experienced servants have told him that there is “nothing to apprehend”—and, of course, where Mr. Woodhouse is concerned, apprehensiveness is all.

But Mr. Knightley’s quiet heroism here should not blind us to Emma’s equally strong-minded behavior: both of them act fast, and they act fast together:

Mr. Knightley and Emma settled it in a few brief sentences: thus—

“Your father will not be easy; why do not you go?”

“I am ready, if the others are.”

“Shall I ring the bell?”

“Yes, do.”  And the bell was rung. . . .

A frank, intelligent, mutually confiding, mutually reliant exchange: no “he said,” “she said,” on the author’s part, no demurring and no hesitation on the characters’—here, these two are calmly decisive amidst all the confusion; they are co-operating, they are equal. They are both forceful, and tactful—tactfulness, whatever the weather, being the single most important requirement for survival in Highbury.

Are they not made for each other? Though it will take them more than 300 pages, and well into a very hot summer, before they both know it.

Some reflections: much writing about Jane Austen emphasizes—indeed, presumes—that she rarely if ever uses literary techniques that could be described as symbolism. I think her treatment of weather contradicts this truism, and here, where the snow is at once a metaphor for the cut-off, snow-globe quality of life in Highbury, and a meteorological phenomenon with its origins in a cyclone of the North Pole as it dissipates itself across the North Atlantic to arrive as a light fall of snow in Surrey—we see the way in which, like her contemporary Wordsworth, she weaves together the realistic and the symbolic. The weather is a symbol of the enclosed and circumscribed world in which Emma has grown up, but it is also a part of the endangering real world which threatens and beckons to the inhabitants of this English village. It is like the war in Europe that has been going on for decades—it was “the chances of military life,” after all, that introduced Captain Weston to Miss Churchill and produced Frank. Not fully understood by these inhabitants of a slowly changing rural England, or by anyone who lives through them, and rarely discussed in any depth, both “the weather . . . and the war” (the phrase is from “At the Team’s Head-Brass” by Edward Thomas, who was writing about rural England 100 years later during another war) have deep consequences for these characters.

First in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Last week, Deborah Barnum wrote about “The Publishing History of Jane Austen’s Emma.” Coming soon: guest posts by Theresa Kenney, Dan Macey, Emily Midorikawa, and Emma Claire Sweeney.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the  celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

You might also be interested in the other celebrations I’ve hosted here, if you haven’t seen them already: An Invitation to Mansfield Park , Pride and Prejudice at 200, and The Custom of the Country at 100.

The Publishing History of Jane Austen’s Emma

In honour of Jane Austen’s 240th birthday today, Deborah Barnum of Jane Austen in Vermont has written a detailed history of the publication of Austen’s novel Emma, which was published on December 23, 1815. (Thank you, Deb!)

Please join us here for more guest posts on Emma later this month and then all through the winter. We’ll begin with Nora Bartlett’s piece on “Emma in the Snow” on December 23rd. I hope you’ll celebrate with us!

Jane Austen in Vermont

As part of Sarah Emsley’s upcoming three month-long celebration of Emma, “Emma in the Snow” beginning on December 23, 2015, I have written this post on its publishing history – an interesting tale gleaned from Austen’s Letters, Deirdre Le Faye’s Chronology, and other scholarly essays. Sarah will be re-blogging it, and we welcome your comments on either site. Emma was published in late December 1815, though the title page states 1816, and hence why there are celebrations both this year and next. I always have felt it appropriate that this book was published so close to Austen’s birthday on the 16th, and why I am posting this today, what would have been her 240th! And December brings to mind the very pivotal and humorous scene on Christmas Eve with Mr. Elton and Emma in the carriage – think snow – it shall be here soon…

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An Invitation to Celebrate “Emma in the Snow”

I’m throwing a party for Emma Woodhouse and you’re invited. Please join us for a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s Emma, which was published at the end of December in 1815.

We’ll begin on December 23, 2015 with a guest post by Nora Bartlett, who’s writing about the snow that falls on the night of the Westons’ Christmas party. You won’t even have to leave your own fireside to attend this winter party, so you needn’t fear, as John Knightley does, “being snowed up a week at Randalls.” All you need to do is follow my blog or subscribe via email and you’ll receive updates about the celebrations.

Among the many people writing guest posts for “Emma in the Snow” are Gillian Dow (on Emma abroad), Cheryl Kinney (on Mr. Woodhouse’s health), Elisabeth Lenckos (on Ford’s shop and materialism), Margaret C. Sullivan (on Miss Bates’s monologues), and Deborah Yaffe (on Emma as an “imaginist”). Deborah Barnum is writing about the publishing history of the novel for December 16th, Jane Austen’s birthday, as a kind of prelude to the series. Please visit “Emma in the Snow” for a full list of contributors.

The series will run until March 19, 2016, with posts on Wednesdays and Fridays, plus a flurry of posts in the last few days of winter (pun intended, of course).

I hope you’ll read along with us and join the discussions! You can also find me on Facebook and Twitter (@Sarah_Emsley).

McNabs Island: “a green cork in the neck of a green bottle”

A trip to McNabs Island this past summer inspired me to revisit Thomas Raddall’s descriptions of the island in his novel Hangman’s Beach (1966). Although I’ve lived in Halifax (off and on) for many years, this was only my second visit to the largest of the islands in Halifax Harbour. The first was on a school field trip when I was eleven, and this second trip was prompted by the picnic hosted by the Friends of McNabs Island Society as a celebration of their 25th anniversary.

It was a cool grey Saturday in July, and hundreds of people gathered to make the trip, learn more about the Island, share a picnic lunch—plus cookies and watermelon provided by the Society—and hike or bike the old roads and trails. My family and I had a wonderful time, and I’m keen to go back again.

I’ve read Hangman’s Beach a couple of times, and I enjoyed rereading what Raddall says about the Peter McNab who bought the island in 1782 (that date comes from the guidebook I bought at the picnic; in the novel, Raddall gives the date for his fictional Peter McNab’s purchase as 1783): “When Peter McNab—Peter the First, as some called him afterwards—came to Halifax, the island lay in the harbor entrance like a green cork in the neck of a green bottle; a cork twisted in a crude 8 and somewhat shrunken in width, so that it did not pretend to stop the mouth of the bottle but left passage for a stream of salt water on both sides.”

Raddall goes on to describe the “stony spit” that “ran out from the island like a lean grey finger pointed at the steep bluff across the water,” “stretched a good half-mile, and made a natural breakwater for the outer anchorage, except in hurricane weather when a wild surf dashed over it and tossed driftwood and tangles of kelp and wrack into McNab’s Cove.” This spit comes to be known as Hangman’s Beach, but at first is known simply as “The Beach.”

“The Beach”

The town of Halifax, Raddall says, “was four miles up the harbor from The Beach. When Peter came, Halifax was just five years old, a small huddle of crude wooden hovels, stores and barracks on part of the harbor slope, shut in by dark green woods that came down to the shore as far as the eye could scan. Gradually as the years went by he watched the hill behind the town become a citadel whose guns looked over the town and anchorage, with other batteries on the little hump in the harbor called George’s Island, and at wooded Point Pleasant, and far out on the step bluff called York Redoubt, directly opposite The Beach.”

Georges Island, with McNabs Island in the background on the right

McNab visits the island in the summers with his children to dig clams and gather lobsters, and “As the summers went by, the short Nova Scotia summers, McNab had a growing itch to own this pleasant retreat in the harbor mouth. Not just the beach or the cove. The whole island.”

Findlays Cove, with “The Beach” in the distance

Fort Ives, built in 1865

Imagine buying a whole island—Peter McNab certainly has grand plans for his business and for his legacy to his son and heir, “young Peter,” and after years of saving and negotiating, he eventually realizes his dream. The novel focuses on this second Peter McNab’s family, his young ward Ellen Dewar, and the tutor he hires to educate his children, Michel Cascamond, during the years of the Napoleonic Wars.

I might write more about the rest of the story sometime, but I’ll stop here for now, and leave you with a few more pictures of this extraordinarily beautiful island.

Here’s a link to a map provided by the Friends of McNabs. The guidebook (which has a great aerial photo of the island on the cover) is also available on their website.

One of the Japanese maples, part of the now overgrown Victorian Garden

Ives Point

Garrison Road. There’s that bend in the road again, which L.M. Montgomery taught me to love.

The Elizabeth Bishop House

A few days ago, I headed out on a road trip to Great Village, Nova Scotia, to take some pictures at the Elizabeth Bishop House and visit with Sandra Barry, author of Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia’s “Home-made” Poet (2011) and Lifting Yesterday: Elizabeth Bishop and Nova Scotia (2014). Sandra was spending the day at the house, and she kindly offered to show me around. The weather was glorious—it was almost hard to remember that it was November. Bishop is best-known as an American writer (she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1956), but she spent part of her childhood in Great Village. Exploring the house that was so important to her prompted me to reread some of her poems and stories when I got home.

The view from the back yard

I took pictures in the kitchen, so I read “Sestina,” in which “The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove / and the child draws another inscrutable house.”

I read “Crusoe in England,” with its reference to “fifty-two / miserable, small volcanoes,” because Sandra showed me the room Bishop played in as a child, where a crumbling newspaper page on the wall shows “Vesuvius in Eruption.”

I read “January First” (her translation of a poem by Octavio Paz), with its concluding lines about the possibility of opening “the day’s doors” to “enter the unknown,” because I was fascinated by the doors and handles and latches in the house.

In “Primer Class,” Bishop talks about how much she loved her slate and pencils despite the “skreeking” noise when she practised writing the number eight on her slate.

I read her story “In the Village,” and took pictures of “the large front bedroom with sloping walls on either side,” and thought about “the echo of a scream” that “hangs over that Nova Scotian village,” the echo that “hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies…. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.”

The house is currently for sale—it’s been on the market for about a year and a half—and its future is uncertain. (If I had an extra $59,900 lying around, I’d be tempted to buy it myself.) For several years it’s been a retreat for writers and artists. You can read more about the history of the house in Sandra’s recent five-part essay on the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary blog:

Part 1: “A ‘common enough’ urge”

Part 2: “The when and why of Bishop’s childhood”

Part 3: “The village takes note”

Part 4: “In others’ words: The Elizabeth Bishop House Artist Retreat”

Part 5: “The next incarnation”

She writes that the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia “has watched the trickle of pilgrims become a steady stream—not, it must be said, like the flood that occurs around ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and her creator Lucy Maud Montgomery in Prince Edward Island; but a serious, continuous flow of visitors from around the world.” I feel tremendously grateful that I had the opportunity to make the pilgrimage to this remarkable place on a sunny November day.

“For as long as people read Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and prose,” Sandra concludes in her essay, “there will a ‘common enough’ desire to see Great Village, to see the places that were so significant in her childhood and in her art, to see this house.”

L.M. Montgomery and the Halifax Public Gardens

“She’ll feel awful bad if her flowers get frosted, especially them dahlias. Octavia sets such store by her dahlias.” In L.M. Montgomery’s 1914 short story “Bessie’s Doll,” a boy named Tommy Puffer overhears Mrs. Jenkins talking about dahlias, and because he can’t stand the idea that the flowers won’t get “a chance to blossom out royally,” he decides to save them from frost by tying newspapers around them, even though he hates Miss Octavia.

The dahlias at the Halifax Public Gardens were hit by frost a couple of days ago, but I spent a lot of time photographing them last week, thereby finding my own way to save them.

While I don’t know if there were dahlias in the Public Gardens during L.M. Montgomery’s time, I do know that Montgomery went for a walk with her friend Lottie Shatford in the Gardens 120 years ago today, on October 22, 1895. She had been living in Halifax for just over a month, studying English literature at Dalhousie, and she was “beginning to feel at home in the big rooms and long halls of the college,” as she wrote on October 3rd (The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 1: 1889-1910, ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston [Oxford, 1985]).

When Montgomery arrived on September 17th, she wrote “HALIFAX” and the date in her diary in capital letters, to emphasize just how important it was to her that she was about to begin her university education at last: “For the past four years the day when I should write that heading in my diary has danced before my eyes, an alluring will-o’-the-wisp of ambition and hope.” She was excited to be in Halifax, but wondered whether “after all it is really worth all the toil and self-sacrifice and struggle that I have expended in bringing it about.”

She found her English classes “very nice” (October 3) and she wrote an account of her earliest memory for Professor Archibald MacMechan—“Mine happens to be that of seeing my mother in her coffin and of putting my tiny baby hand on her cold face” (October 9). She and Lottie went to the Public Gardens on the 22nd “because we have to write a theme on them tomorrow.”

I’ve been to the Gardens several times recently, partly to admire the extraordinary beauty of the dahlias and partly because I’m taking a photography class this month, which means I, too, am working on specific assignments. This online class—which I’m enjoying immensely—is taught by Joy Sussman, whose work I discovered through her gorgeous photos of Edith Wharton’s house, The Mount.

Montgomery’s evening was “delightful,” “clear and crisp.” She wrote that “the gardens seem lonely and deserted now but are sadly beautiful even in their desolation,” with their grey paths, “whirls of crinkled leaves, “splendid amber-gold” horse chestnuts, and lakes and ponds “calmly silver in the dusky light.”

After her walk, she attended a “very pretty” performance of “Iolanthe,” remarking in her diary that her late night at the opera meant she was “getting shockingly dissipated.” However, she reminded herself, “one can go to bed every night and one cannot go to the opera every night.”

I wrote about L.M. Montgomery and Edith Wharton a few years ago—while their financial circumstances were quite different, both of them achieved literary success despite the fact that their families insisted education for young women was neither important nor desirable.

And both Montgomery and Wharton loved gardens. “Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist,” Wharton wrote in a 1911 letter to Morton Fullerton, “and [The Mount], every line of which is my own work, far surpasses the House of Mirth” (The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis [Scribner, 1989]). Just as Montgomery relied on gardens, parks, and forests for nourishment—finding, for example, that her walks in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park provided a kind of cure for homesickness—Wharton turned to her gardens for comfort. As Hermione Lee writes in Edith Wharton (2007), there were times “when her garden’s rich dazzle of colour and scents was a sensual delight and a comfort to her.” On All Souls’ Day in 1923, Wharton wrote that she “sat alone in the evening with all my dead,” thinking about friends she had lost, and she recorded the names of the flowers blooming around her. Dahlias were first on her list.

Here’s the link to other posts I’ve written about L.M. Montgomery in Nova Scotia.