Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 38

The Real Reads Sense and Sensibility – a review

Gill Tavner’s abridged version of Sense and Sensibility makes radical, and successful, changes to Jane Austen’s novel. The key to her adaptation is the choice to tell the story of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in the first person, from the perspective of their younger sister Margaret. A minor character in Austen’s novel, Margaret is close enough to her sisters to watch their romances unfold, and understandably interested to see what her own future as an eligible young woman might be. Emma Thompson’s screenplay for the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility expanded Margaret’s role, making her a more lively character who enjoys joking with Edward Ferrars, but here Tavner makes Margaret even more central, as she becomes the main reader of her sisters’ lives and the choices they make about romance and marriage.

Any writer who creates an abridged version of a classic novel faces difficult choices about what to leave out and what parts of the plot and characters must remain for the story to be comprehensible. One of the greatest strengths of the Real Reads series of abridged novels (and other classic works) is that at the end of the book, there’s a section called “Taking Things Further” that advises interested readers to seek out “the full novel in all its original splendour,” explains the “sad but necessary” process of omitting subplots and details, and gives additional information designed to “fill in some of the gaps,” while acknowledging that “nothing can beat the original.”

This edition includes a brief essay about the social context in which Austen wrote Sense and Sensibility, and while many readers would argue with the assertion that “Jane Austen does not include politics in her novels,” the essay is otherwise helpful in explaining the importance of marriage and the moral code by which courtships were judged in Austen’s time, along with an introduction to the contrast between the “age of reason” and the “age of feeling.” A bibliography, a list of Austen-related websites, and a few discussion questions about characters, themes, and style complete the volume. Carol Shields’s short biography of Austen would be an excellent addition to this bibliography that’s designed to introduce readers to Austen’s life and work.

As in her abridged Pride and Prejudice, where she immediately takes the reader to the heart of the conflict between Elizabeth and Darcy by dramatizing Darcy’s first proposal, Tavner’s choice of opening lines is very different from Austen’s. Instead of rehearsing the family history of the Dashwoods, the Real Reads version of Sense and Sensibility gives us Margaret’s voice and her reflections on what’s happened to her sisters and what’s next for her own prospects for love and marriage. “I must admit,” she says, “that I enter this bewildering adult world with some trepidation. After two years watching the confusion, intrigues and intense emotions of my sisters’ paths to true love, I cannot help but feel apprehensive about what the next few years might hold in store for me.” It’s clear right away that Margaret is someone a younger reader can identify with, an observer of the strangeness of the adult world. Left in Barton Cottage with her mother after her sisters marry, she has plenty of free time and she decides to fill it with the project of writing down the story of Elinor and Marianne. She’s well aware, however, that her neighbour Sir John Middleton and his mother-in-law are thinking of her as “their next matchmaking project.”

Margaret’s tone can be informal at times, as when she adds here, speaking of Sir John and Mrs. Jennings, “You know how adults can be.” Most of the time, the informal tone is appropriate and conversational, although at one point it’s jarringly modern. When she tells Elinor that she saw Willoughby cut off a lock of Marianne’s hair, she says Elinor “told her off for not respecting their privacy.”

If Margaret is to narrate the full story, she has to be present in more of the scenes than she is in Austen’s novel, and thus Tavner has her accompany her sisters to London when they stay with Mrs. Jennings. This is a bit of a stretch, as she would be considered too young for a London visit to be of any use to her social career, but it allows Tavner to have her witness important scenes, and the fact that Austen doesn’t send her to London is the very first thing pointed out in the section at the end on “filling in gaps.” It’s believable that Margaret would watch Marianne’s impatience for a letter or a visit from Willoughby, and even that she would happen to overhear Colonel Brandon telling Elinor about how Willoughby abandoned his ward, Eliza. And Tavner thankfully stops short of showing Margaret at the party where Marianne at last sees Willoughby. Margaret explains that she’s “Too young for a London party,” and she waits impatiently to find out what’s happening.

Whether I’m reading an abridged version of an Austen novel or watching a film adaptation of one of them, I always think about the brilliance of the original, and sometimes I wonder why we seek out these reinterpretations of her work instead of just reading and rereading what she wrote. I confess there are moments at which I feel that I’m an Austen purist at heart—and I do think it’s very important to keep returning to the novels themselves, to focus on the characters and plots she created, to appreciate the subtleties of her style and her moral vision. There are now so many stories, novels, films, games, board books, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and so on, that are linked in some way to Austen’s life and fiction that it would be easy to fill a lifetime with Austen ephemera and to lose sight of the original works entirely.

At the same time, I definitely appreciate the richness of the range of ways in which writers have been inspired to offer new perspectives on the originals, many (though certainly not all) of which are entertaining and wonderful in their own right. This version of Sense and Sensibility makes me think afresh about what it meant to be a young girl in Austen’s time, wondering what the future would bring. It’s an excellent introduction to the novel for young readers. Respectful, smart, and playful, Gill Tavner’s Real Reads adaptations belong with the very best of the many reinterpretations of Austen’s novels.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was published 202 years ago today, on October 30, 1811.

Elaine Bander in Halifax; Mansfield Park in Montréal

Well, what a great weekend we’ve just had here in Halifax, with Elaine Bander, President of JASNA Canada, in town. She gave a wonderful talk on Friday afternoon in the Dalhousie University Department of English Seminar Series. Members of JASNA Nova Scotia gathered with faculty and students from Dal and other local universities, along with members of the general public, to hear Elaine speak on “Jane Austen’s Fanny Price and Lord Nelson: Rethinking the National Hero(ine).”

Elaine discussed passages in Jane Austen’s letters that suggest she was thinking about “models of principled resistance” in several books, including Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1808), while she was writing Mansfield Park. Austen’s characterization of Fanny Price may have been influenced by her readings of masculine heroism. Fanny looks like a frail heroine, but her principled and steady resistance to her family’s attempts to persuade her to marry Henry Crawford shows that she is far more powerful than she appears. Elaine drew our attention to yet another model of heroism that may have influenced Austen, Robert Southey’s Life of Lord Nelson (1813). Without claiming that Southey’s book was a direct influence, Elaine suggested that the idea of Nelson’s heroism may have prompted Austen to explore what happens when a timid young woman decides to be courageous. I like the idea of Fanny saying to herself, as Nelson did, “Well then, … I will be a hero.” Elaine pointed out that the “scale of her endeavor” is different, “but not her courage.”

The talk was followed by a wine and cheese reception, courtesy of the Dal English Department. Here’s a photo of Elaine in conversation with Sheila Johnson Kindred, a JASNA NS member who teaches Philosophy at Saint Mary’s University, and John Baxter, Professor of English at Dalhousie, who introduced Elaine’s talk. Sara Malton, who teaches 19th Century literature at Saint Mary’s, and David Monaghan, who is retired from the English Department at Mount Saint Vincent University, interrupted their conversation to smile for the camera.

Sara Malton, Elaine Bander, Sheila Johnson Kindred, John Baxter, David Monaghan

JASNA Nova Scotia members enjoyed talking with Elaine over a dinner hosted by Anita Campbell on Friday night, and on Saturday, several members met again to take the ferry from Halifax to Dartmouth for lunch with Elaine at a favourite local restaurant with a fabulous view of Halifax harbour, The Wooden Monkey.

Sheila Kindred, Elaine Bander, Lou Harrington, Anne Thompson, Carole Thompson

Dartmouth, from the ferry

It was another glorious October day in Nova Scotia – the perfect day for a trip across the water – and we enjoyed hearing Elaine’s description of her plans for the 2014 JASNA AGM: “Mansfield Park in Montréal: Contexts, Conventions & Controversies.” Members of our Region are looking forward to attending the AGM and offered support for the event.

It’s sure to be a great weekend: the combination of Mansfield Park and Montréal is irresistible. The museums! The cafés and restaurants! The bicycles! The controversial and brilliant Mansfield Park! And what a line-up of plenary speakers: Robert Miles (University of Victoria) on “Mansfield Park and Moral Luck,” Lynn Festa (Rutgers University) on “Mansfield Park and Noise,” and Patrick Stokes (former chairman of the Jane Austen Society, UK – and a direct descendant of Jane Austen’s brother Charles) on “‘Rears and Vices’: The Georgian Royal Navy.” And, of course, there will be many breakout sessions, workshops, and other activities (I’m really hoping for a Sunday morning run, as I loved the one we did at the Philadelphia AGM) – and a Regency Ball. October 10-12, 2014 at Le Centre Sheraton Montréal Hotel. Book your hotel room now, join JASNA if you aren’t already a member, and register for the conference next May.

Many thanks, once again, to Elaine for coming to Halifax, and to JASNA Canada, the Department of English at Dalhousie University, especially Len Diepeveen, David Evans, Mary Beth MacIsaac, and John Baxter, and the members of JASNA Nova Scotia, especially Anita Campbell, Carole Thompson, Sheila and Hugh Kindred, and our Regional Coordinator Anne Thompson, for making this weekend possible.

Edith Wharton’s Portrait of a Lady

Part Nine in a series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country.

During her New York years, Undine Spragg—now Mrs. Ralph Marvell—hires Claud Walsingham Popple to paint her portrait. In society’s view, it’s one of Popple’s “merits that he always subordinated art to elegance, in life as well as in his portraits. The ‘messy’ element of production was no more visible in his expensively screened and tapestried studio than its results were perceptible in his painting; and it was often said, in praise of his work, that he was the only artist who kept his studio tidy enough for a lady to sit to him in a new dress” (Chapter 14).

When several guests are invited to tea to see the portrait for the first time, they’re greeted by the “full-length portrait of Mrs. Ralph Marvell, who, from her lofty easel and her heavily garlanded frame, faced the doorway with the air of having been invited to ‘receive’ for Mr. Popple.” As Emily J. Orlando writes in Edith Wharton in Context, “Undine Spragg typifies the women of Wharton’s later fiction who manage to draw pleasure and power from a culture of display by overseeing their own representation and making

Mrs. Ralph Curtis, by John Singer Sargent

compromises that ensure their survival.” Suggesting that Popple is “a veiled John Singer Sargent,” Orlando says “Wharton may have had in mind Sargent’s ‘Mrs. Ralph Curtis’ when she unveiled Undine’s full-length portrait.” Both Undine and Lisa Colt Curtis have “rosy gold” hair and “shimmering” dresses. Orlando writes that “Both portraits suggest the subject’s self-possession as well as her confidence in the power her beauty might purchase.”

Undine is beginning to feel that she made a mistake in marrying into the Marvell family—“that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous; that she was in the case of those who have cast in their lot with a fallen cause, or—to use an analogy more within her range—who have hired an opera box on the wrong night.”

But when the portrait is revealed, “the success of the picture obscured all other impressions. She saw herself throning in a central panel at the spring exhibition, with the crowd pushing about the picture, repeating her name; and she decided to stop on the way home and telephone her press-agent to do a paragraph about Popple’s tea.” Seeing the portrait of herself enhances her sense of her own beauty and importance, and gives her further confidence about the successes she’ll enjoy in the future.

For further reading:

“Visual Arts,” by Emily J. Orlando, in Edith Wharton in Context, ed. Laura Rattray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Next in this series: Part Ten: How Much Did Edith Wharton Revise The Custom of the Country?—revisions between the serialized text published in Scribner’s Magazine and the text of the first edition

My other posts on The Custom of the Country:

Part One: How I Discovered The Custom of the Country

Part Three: “I’ll never try anything again till I try New York”

Part Four: Undine Spragg as the Empress Josephine

Part Five: Marriage, Divorce, and “diversified elements of misery”

Part Six: “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”

Part Seven: “Trading Up”: Wharton’s Influence on Candace Bushnell and Julian Fellowes—Undine as a film star?

Part Eight: What Edith Wharton Tells Us About The Way We Live Now

That moment when you’re revising obsessively and it feels like “an attack of scrupulosis”…: On revising The Custom of the Country

Happy 100th Anniversary to Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country! The first installment of the novel was published in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1913.

Writing with “dogged obstinacy”: In the summer of 1911, Edith Wharton was “digging away” at her “Big Novel,” The Custom of the Country, wondering if “dogged obstinacy” could “replace freedom & inspiration.”

“The books were too valuable to be taken down”: On Undine Spragg’s treatment of her son Paul in the last chapter of The Custom of the Country, and Paul’s experience of nightmarish library in which the books can never be read, and no one ever writes.

French Fact and American Fiction: Wharton’s use of place names in The Custom of the Country.

Elaine Bander’s talk on Mansfield Park – this Friday!

How wonderful for Halifax that Elaine Bander is coming here to give a talk on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park at Dalhousie University on Friday. Please join us in the English Department (Rm. 1198, McCain Arts and Social Sciences Building, 6135 University Avenue) at 3:45pm to listen to Elaine talk about “Jane Austen’s Fanny Price and Lord Nelson: Rethinking the National Hero(ine).”

Elaine is warm, witty, and wonderful, and I’m so glad she’s coming to visit us. She’s coordinating the 2014 Jane Austen Society of North America AGM on Mansfield Park, next October in Montréal, and she’s the President of JASNA Canada. If you missed my interview with her a couple of weeks ago, you can find it here. She talks about her work on Austen and Frances Burney, her experience as the JASNA International Visitor in 2011, and why she thinks Austen is so popular these days. And, of course, she gives us a glimpse of some of the exciting things we can look forward to at next year’s AGM.

We’re getting close to the end of the Year of Pride and Prejudice, and that means the Year of Mansfield Park is almost here. Mansfield Park is darker and more controversial than light, bright, and sparkling P & P, but it’s a powerful, richly rewarding novel. 200 years of Mary Crawford’s charms and games of speculation. 200 years of Fanny Price and her heroic resistance to the overbearing men and women in her life. Let’s start the celebrations on Friday! If you’re in (or near) Halifax, I hope you’ll join us for Elaine’s talk and a reception afterwards.

On behalf of JASNA Nova Scotia, I’d like to say thanks to JASNA and Dalhousie’s Department of English for making this event possible.

What Edith Wharton Tells Us About The Way We Live Now

Part Eight in a series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country.

Today’s the day! The first edition of The Custom of the Country was published 100 years ago today, on October 18, 1913. Happy anniversary to the book Edith Wharton called her “Big Novel,” her “magnum opus.”

George Packer wrote earlier this year about the experience of reading Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now and finding New York society reflected in Trollope’s London: “Greed is eternal, but when the money flows as plentifully upward as in London circa 1873 or New York circa 2013, and is as unequally distributed, it becomes a moral toxin, saturates the world of culture, makes relationships more competitive, turns desire into the pursuit of status, replaces solid things with mirages.” The same toxic effect appears in the New York circa 1913 world of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country, as money motivates both the beautiful Undine Spragg and the self-made businessman Elmer Moffatt to climb higher and higher in pursuit of the things they want, with little regard for the effect of their actions on other people.

In a wonderful new collection of essays on Wharton’s life and works, Edith Wharton in Context, editor Laura Rattray highlights the “breathtakingly contemporary relevance” of The Custom of the Country “in the burning embers of the economic meltdown post 2008.” Wharton’s criticism of materialism, cultural ignorance, and the dangers of extreme versions of Emersonian self-reliance is more relevant than ever.

Undine Spragg understands competition, and knows that beauty helps her win, but she doesn’t understand the culture she seeks to enter and dominate. She makes no effort to understand people, tradition, art, or architecture. She hurts her New York husband, Ralph Marvell, when she has her jewellery, including her sapphire and diamond engagement ring, reset. With no thought of the meaning of these “family relics, kept unchanged through several generations,” Undine changes them to suit herself, utterly “unconscious of the wound she inflicted in destroying the identity of the jewels” (Chapter 15). Later, her French husband, Raymond de Chelles, is shocked to find that she thinks he should sell the family estate so they have more money to spend. As Cecilia Macheski points out in her essay on “Architecture,” Undine consistently “misreads the architecture that she inhabits.”

This collection of thirty-three essays, on topics ranging from publication history, contemporary reviews, obituaries, biographies, and stage and screen adaptations, to gender, race, imperialism, naturalism, World War I, and the Great Depression, plus a chronology that places Wharton in her cultural and historical context, is a fascinating guide to the life and writings of a prolific, learned, energetic, and enigmatic woman who wrote some of the most enduring fiction in American literature.

It’s in The Custom of the Country that Rattray finds an apt metaphor for the importance of reading Wharton in context: in this novel, as elsewhere in Wharton’s writing, Rattray says in her essay on “Contextual Revisions,” “to deny context is to deny meaning,” just as Undine “violates context” when she has the Marvell jewels reset and arranges for the sale of the de Chelles family tapestries. (Her power does have its limits—she can’t quite pull off the sale of the entire chateau.) Context, writes Rattray, “is the Goliath glue that binds together the writer’s social, economic, literary, aesthetic, historical whole.”

In an essay on “Social Traditions,” Adam Jabbur makes the excellent point that while Wharton’s novels are often “Satirical and biting,” “they retain at least the shadow of possibility—an image, however unclear, of a future that has not lost everything of the past.”  I can’t agree, however, with his subsequent argument that Undine is not Wharton’s “primary object of condemnation.” While Wharton has a complex understanding of her heroine’s character and motivation, and is even at times sympathetic to her, she is also very clear about the devastating effects of Undine’s ambitions on other people, especially Ralph. (I’ve written about Undine’s response to Ralph’s suicide in an essay for Persuasions On-Line.) The Marvell family and other members of the New York elite may be susceptible to attacks from ambitious outsiders and “doomed to extinction,” as Ralph prophesies early on (Chapter 5), but Undine is ultimately to blame for the callous way she manipulates her family, her friends, and her husbands.

First edition of The Custom of the Country

Through her portrait of Undine, as Linda Costanzo Cahir argues in “Wharton and the American Romantics,” Wharton raises questions about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance: “Fully unconstrained by traditional standards of conduct and devoid of any homage to custom, she, arguably, carries Emerson’s creed to its dangerously logical conclusion, and, consequently, dramatizes what Wharton understands to be the inherent flaw in Emerson’s doctrine. At its extreme, Emersonian self-reliance can not only mortally harm others, but also carry its practitioner to a world fully void of humanity, decency, and, ironically, divinity.”

Undine Spragg of Apex () vows to do whatever it takes to get what she wants. She tells Ralph early in their courtship that what she wants and expects is “everything!” (Chapter 7), yet in the end, she feels “there were other things she might want if she knew about them” (Chapter 46). As I’ve suggested in my introduction to the Broadview edition of the novel, “she does not want enough. Undine may want all the things that signify social success, but her ‘everything’ does not include love, and this is the reason why her search is doomed to fail.” Edith Wharton in Context helps us understand the way Wharton lived then, which helps us understand what her writing tells us about life both then and now.

Next in this series: Part Nine: Edith Wharton’s Portrait of a Lady—Mr. Popple’s portraits and Undine’s powers

My other posts on The Custom of the Country:

Part One: How I Discovered The Custom of the Country

Part Three: “I’ll never try anything again till I try New York”

Part Four: Undine Spragg as the Empress Josephine

Part Five: Marriage, Divorce, and “diversified elements of misery”

Part Six: “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”

Part Seven: “Trading Up”: Wharton’s Influence on Candace Bushnell and Julian Fellowes—Undine as a film star?

That moment when you’re revising obsessively and it feels like “an attack of scrupulosis”…: On revising The Custom of the Country

Happy 100th Anniversary to Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country! The first installment of the novel was published in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1913.

Writing with “dogged obstinacy”: In the summer of 1911, Edith Wharton was “digging away” at her “Big Novel,” The Custom of the Country, wondering if “dogged obstinacy” could “replace freedom & inspiration.”

“The books were too valuable to be taken down”: On Undine Spragg’s treatment of her son Paul in the last chapter of The Custom of the Country, and Paul’s experience of nightmarish library in which the books can never be read, and no one ever writes.

French Fact and American Fiction: Wharton’s use of place names in The Custom of the Country.

Among the Janeites – a review

What are Janeites, and who wants to be one of them, or spend time among them? George Saintsbury invented the word to describe Jane Austen’s fans in 1894, and in the decades since, the word has been both embraced and rejected by Austen’s readers. In Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom, Deborah Yaffe explores what it means to be a reader so devoted to Austen that the experience is transformative. Focusing on the North American Janeite and the history of the Jane Austen Society of North America, she profiles members who dress in period costume, make pilgrimages to Austen-related sites in England, read Austen’s novels for therapeutic reasons and debate ways of interpreting them, and blog about the diverse contemporary manifestations of a fascination with Austen’s works and her world.

It’s especially interesting to read about the creativity that Austen has inspired. What is it about Austen, Yaffe asks, that makes her readers think they can be writers, too? She speculates that the proliferation of prequels, sequels, and other variations on Austen’s works may have something to do with the idea that Austen “seems at first glance an unintimidating figure — the country clergyman’s daughter, without much money or formal education, who traveled little, socialized mostly with relatives and neighbors, and wrote about the stuff of ordinary life, the family conflicts and love stories that we’ve all lived through ourselves.” She imagines Janeites thinking, “If she could write like that, surely we can too!”

Jane Austen inspires people to write, to interpret and reimagine her novels, and to research the Regency period. She inspires people to recreate the clothing, accessories, customs, and food of the time, but she also inspires them to change their lives. Yaffe’s story of Christine Shih’s discovery of Austen’s powerful heroines, in a chapter on “Austen Therapy,” is particularly moving: it was from Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price that Shih absorbed the confidence and strength she needed to survive a difficult childhood. If Austen’s heroines can be courageous and confident, surely we can too.

Not all readers of Jane Austen are happy to identify with the term “Janeite,” because it can imply a kind of uncritical adoration and a familiarity with a great writer so removed from us in time and literary achievement that we can never quite justify being on a first-name basis. But if being a Janeite means being inspired by the strong women Austen wrote about, and being inspired to write, research, and create, then the experience promises to be a rewarding one. As Maggie Sullivan of Austenblog says in Yaffe’s chapter on “Jane.net,” “Janeite-ville is a big tent,” with room for many different kinds of Austen readers.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to attend a JASNA AGM, reading Among the Janeites will give you a good introduction to the experience, minus the details of the academic papers. Yaffe talks about some aspects of the academic side of things in a chapter on “The Knowledge Business,” but sometimes the conference papers seem to get in the way of her story, as when she attends “one last breakout session” featuring “yet another college professor” before heading for her hotel room to get ready for the banquet and ball. Leaving out what the critics and scholars say is a big omission, because serious academic work is always central to the conferences, but it’s one easily remedied if you read JASNA’s two peer-reviewed journals, Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line, alongside Yaffe’s book. Both journals include many of the papers presented at every AGM.

If you often attend the AGMs and sometimes miss one, as I did this year — much to my regret, because this year’s focus was 200 years of Pride and Prejudice — then reading this book will re-introduce you to old friends and acquaintances, tell you their stories with wit, humour, and respect, and give you the illusion that, for a few hours at least, you’re back among the Janeites. I can’t wait to read the conference papers on Pride and Prejudice, so I can hear what my fellow Janeites were saying this year in Minneapolis.

I’m grateful to Deborah Yaffe for telling the fascinating, often very touching stories of some of Austen’s most devoted readers, and I’m grateful to her for what she says about Austen’s own life story. She reminds us that while the country clergyman’s daughter may seem unintimidating, “it’s the very ordinariness of Austen’s life that is the most intimidating thing about her: nothing explains her achievement except the ineffable quality of her mind, and who among us can lay claim to that?” Whether we think of her as “Jane” or as “Austen,” we need to remember just how extraordinary her achievement is.

Related links:

Deborah Yaffe’s website and Facebook page

Jane Austen Society of North America

Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line

JASNA 2013 AGM: Pride and Prejudice

Austenblog

Austenprose

Jane Austen’s World

“We really do inhabit the novels”: An Interview with Elaine Bander, President of JASNA Canada

Elaine Bander

Elaine Bander will be visiting Halifax on October 25th to give a lecture called “Jane Austen’s Fanny Price and Lord Nelson: Rethinking the National Hero(ine).” This exciting event is co-sponsored by the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) and the Department of English at Dalhousie University, and the talk will be held in the Marion McCain Arts and Social Sciences Building (6135 University Avenue, Halifax, Nova Scotia), Room 1198, at 3:45pm.

Elaine is President of JASNA Canada, President of The Burney Society, and Coordinator of the 2014 JASNA AGM, which will be held in Montréal, and will focus on Mansfield Park. She is an excellent speaker and we’re very much looking forward to both her visit and her lecture. She graciously agreed to answer a few questions about her research and her abiding interest in Austen’s novels.

What’s the most memorable thing you’ve done this year to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice?

Ha! I baked a Pride and Prejudice birthday cake for the JASNA-Montreal folks. We decided on short notice to have a birthday celebration at my house. I am an excellent free-range cook, but not much of a baker. I baked a quite acceptable yellow butter cake and iced it and EVEN DECORATED IT to look like a copy of Pride and Prejudice (sort of). Someone asked me for the recipe. Success!

What’s your perspective on why Austen’s novels are so popular with twenty-first century readers?

I think Austen’s novels ought to be popular with everyone, everywhere, because Austen took such care to use careful, non-dating language, to avoid cultural clichés, and to observe psychology truthfully, but there’s no denying that she’s hit the big time in recent decades. I’m afraid I have to attribute her new success to multimedia: films, TV, pop cultural icons. This probably brings new readers to Austen. Perhaps they are looking for the romance, or quaint formal manners, or pretty décor and floaty dresses, that were so attractive in the films. I am confident, however, that anyone who actually reads the novels stays for brilliant writing and memorable characters. Austen’s novels are particularly brilliant at involving each careful reader in the same experiences as her heroines. We really do inhabit the novels. But as for the sudden popularity — that has to be due to the films, the pop-culture gateway. The novels haven’t changed.

When did you first discover Austen, and which novel did you read first?

Ah, confession: When I was about twelve, a friend gave me a copy of Pride and Prejudice to read. She knew I liked to read 19th-century novels and thought I’d enjoy this one. I couldn’t get past the first chapter. The dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet — can you believe it? — seemed so choppy and stilted to me. “Prejudice” had led me to expect a Brontë-esque tail of racial discrimination and rebellion. No Jane Austen for me! Then, in my third year as an undergraduate, I took a 19th-century novel survey course, and read Emma. Revelation! What brilliance! I never looked back. In the next two years I read everything Austen wrote, and then began a PhD for which I eventually wrote a dissertation on Austen.

You’ve been very active in The Burney Society for many years, as well as in JASNA. Tell us a bit about the intersections between your work on Jane Austen and your work on Frances Burney. Which of Burney’s novels would you recommend to an Austen fan who hasn’t yet discovered her, and why?

I think I’m the only person alive who read a Burney novel before she read an Austen one. In my first year at McGill, living in the Royal Victoria College, I poked around the RVC library for fun reading. One of the novels I read was Burney’s first novel, Evelina, the book that made her famous in her 20s. As a consequence, I’ve tended to read Austen in relation to the books that she read, the works of the late 18th century. I’ve always been fascinated by how Austen both pays great respect to Burney, her literary mother, but also transforms the novel form that she inherited from Burney. Those transformations provide real insight into Austen’s interests and aims. She is always writing against readers’ expectations.

Most people suggest that readers should start with Evelina: it’s light, bright and sparkling, a fun book, and, like Pride and Prejudice, a Cinderella tale. But Pride and Prejudice is Austen’s least typical novel. I think Camilla meant more to her — her name appears on the subscription list! — but I hate to recommend Camilla. It’s 5 volumes long, and many people find Burney’s repeated deferral of resolution maddening. After all, the heroine and hero get engaged halfway through: what can possibly go wrong? But I find it fascinating, especially in relation to Mansfield Park, which I believe Camilla at least partly inspired.

In 2011 you were chosen to participate in JASNA’s International Visitor Program, which provides funding for a six-week trip to Chawton to work on an Austen-related project, while also working with the staff at Jane Austen’s House Museum, Chawton House Library, and/or St. Nicholas Church. What was your research project, and what was it like to work in Chawton for six weeks? Did you feel that the experience helped strengthen connections between the North American and British Jane Austen Societies?

The year (2011) when I was the IVP, it was just for a month, but that felt about right to me. Nobody much wanted me to do any work for them — in the end, my only contribution to the Chawton community was to help prune the roses in the rose garden at CHL. The staff were short-handed and the roses were clearly desperate! I loved the experience of living in the country, Jane Austen’s country. Like Jane, I had to walk a mile into Alton to do any chores, buy food, stamps or newspapers. Or like Jane, I could choose the lovely walk across the fields, woods and sheep meadows to Upper Farringdon. Jane walked there regularly to visit a friend. I walked to visit the excellent Rose & Crown and admire the pretty village.

On my last weekend, I continued over further fields and hanger woods to Selborne, up onto Selborne Common and down the Zig Zag path to visit the Gilbert White House. Because I stopped for tea afterwards, I missed the last bus back and had to walk home: four miles each way.

Gilbert White’s Garden

I really cherished being part of the Chawton community for a month: dropping in to the Jane Austen House Museum, gossiping with CHL staff, watching the bell-ringers practice in St. Nicholas’s on Monday evenings (and being invited to pull a bell!), occasionally speaking with the tourists who were always walking up the drive to the church, meeting people on the walk into Alton, keeping track of the livestock, waking to the sounds of the rescue hens, the horses next door, the sheep nearby, the wood pigeons cooing…. When I returned for four days this summer, I was greeted like a friend. It’s a wonderful program, and certainly builds a trans-Atlantic community!

But of course my main reason for being there was the Library. I had proposed to research material for compiling “A Common-Place Book for Fanny Price.” I view Fanny as Austen’s only really intellectual heroine. She is a reader. The only Austen character who is said to keep a commonplace book (a collection of extracts from reading) is Mary Bennet, so clearly Austen didn’t think much of the practice, but I wanted to find source material that might have inspired Fanny’s values and courage. I found more than I bargained for. You’ll hear about some of that.

Chawton House Library

You’re the Coordinator for next year’s JASNA AGM, October 10-12, 2014, entitled “ Mansfield Park in Montréal: Contexts, Conventions, and Controversies.” What are some of the highlights of the program that we can look forward to, and in what ways will the AGM help us move beyond the so-called “Fanny Wars,” in which readers argue (often vehemently, as you know!) about the perceived strengths and weaknesses of Austen’s most controversial heroine, Fanny Price?

Well, first of all, I hope our conference will inspire people to return to the novel and read, without prejudice, what Austen wrote. She is so careful to describe the behaviour and the values of all of her characters.  If people read carefully and fairly — as each Austen novel invites us to do — they must sympathise with Fanny’s struggle for self-knowledge and moral courage. That doesn’t mean seeing her as a little goody two shoes. Austen doesn’t do perfect.

Robert Miles

We are hoping for a reader’s AGM, asking people to return, critically, to the text, but we’re also planning a lot of fun activities. We’ve commissioned a comic play about rehearsing Lovers’ Vows at Mansfield. We will have Glee Singing and Star-Gazing and walks in the Wilderness and a wonderful Ball. We have great plenary speakers, all new to JASNA: Robert Miles will give us a thought-provoking talk about Austen’s values. Lynn Festa will provide a dynamic discourse on MP and noise. And Patrick Stokes, descendant of Charles Austen, will leave us in stitches while he tells as about the Georgian Royal Navy.

Lynn Festa

We’ve worked closely with the hotel’s executive chef to prepare a menus that both references the novel and uses our best seasonal terroir. And our tote bags will be very, very special.

Do you have a favourite quotation from Mansfield Park?

Interesting question! Not really. Mansfield Park is particularly rich in entire, almost allegorical scenes rather than single speeches.

But I frequently cite Fanny’s remark to Mr. Crawford when he’s walking with her in Portsmouth and asks her to be his moral guide: “‘We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be’” (Vol. 3, Ch. 11). I think this statement is key to all of Jane Austen’s works.

~~~~~

Thanks, Elaine! Now, dear readers, it’s your turn. Do you agree that what Fanny says is key to Austen’s works? What are your favourite quotations from Mansfield Park, and do you have any other comments or questions for Elaine?

We hope to see you in Halifax on October 25, 2013 — or in Montréal in October 2014!

P.S. You can read the Call for Papers for the 2014 AGM in Montréal here. The deadline for proposals is October 15th, so make haste, make haste.

P.P.S. JASNA’s International Visitor Program is now accepting applications for 2014, and you can read all about the program and the application process here. Write a persuasive proposal, and you, too, could live and work in Chawton for a few weeks.

“Trading Up”: Wharton’s Influence on Candace Bushnell and Julian Fellowes

Part Seven in a series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country.

Just as there’s a direct line from Wharton’s Undine Spragg to Madonna’s “Material Girl,” there’s a direct line from Undine to the heroine of Candace Bushnell’s 2003 novel Trading Up, Janey Wilcox. Janey is beautiful, ambitious, and determined to get money and status in New York through trading one man for another. Her husband Selden (shades of Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth), thinks at one point that “Ever since they had returned from their honeymoon, she’d been attacking New York with the zeal of a mountain climber determined to reach the highest summit, with him, it seemed, relegated to a Sherpa in cummerbund and black tie.”

Bushnell acknowledges the link to Wharton when Janey tells Selden The Custom of the Country should be a movie. She’s been trying to persuade her former lover Comstock Dibble, head of Parador Pictures, that he’s the right man to make it: “‘It’s never been done before and he’d be good at it.’” I agree with her that it would make a great movie. I would love to see Undine as a film star—it just might be “the one part she was really made for” (of course I’m quoting her thoughts from the novel out of context here, but the line fits my own purpose so well!).

At one point there were plans for a film adaptation, written and directed by Christopher Hampton, but the film never materialized. In 1995, Entertainment Weekly advertized the adaptation: “Midwestern beauty Undine Spragg (Uma Thurman) and her parents (Sally Field, Paul Newman) move to turn-of-the-century New York City to take society by storm. But will a youthful indiscretion—namely her ex-husband (Robert De Niro)—spoil Undine’s plans?”

While there is as yet no film version of The Custom of the Country, Wharton’s “Big Novel” has influenced Julian Fellowes and the creation of Downton Abbey, as well as Candace Bushnell and her New York heroines. Fellowes says that after discovering The House of Mirth, “I moved on from Lily Bart to The Custom of the Country and it is quite true that I felt this was my book; that the novel was talking to me in a most extreme and immediate way. I think it’s a remarkable piece of writing. In Undine Spragg, Wharton has created an anti-heroine absolutely in the same rank as Becky Sharp, Scarlet O’Hara, or Lizzy Eustace. Undine has no values except ambition, greed and desire, and yet through the miracle of Wharton’s writing, you are on her side. That’s what’s so extraordinary about the book…. All of this was a tremendous inspiration to me. I decided, largely because of her work, that it was time I wrote something. Because of Edith Wharton and the old saying ‘write what you know,’ I decided to write what I knew, not to try and find a more interesting story than my own but to write about my own past and the world I’d grown up in.”

What do you think of the connections between Wharton’s novels and Downton Abbey? Do you see Undine’s influence on the series, and on Bushnell’s heroines (and anti-heroines)?

Next in this series: Part Eight: What Edith Wharton Tells Us About The Way We Live Now—The Custom of the Country and Edith Wharton in Context, edited by Laura Rattray

My other posts on The Custom of the Country:

Part One: How I Discovered The Custom of the Country

Part Three: “I’ll never try anything again till I try New York”

Part Four: Undine Spragg as the Empress Josephine

Part Five: Marriage, Divorce, and “diversified elements of misery”

Part Six: “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”

That moment when you’re revising obsessively and it feels like “an attack of scrupulosis”…: On revising The Custom of the Country

Happy 100th Anniversary to Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country! The first installment of the novel was published in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1913.

Writing with “dogged obstinacy”: In the summer of 1911, Edith Wharton was “digging away” at her “Big Novel,” The Custom of the Country, wondering if “dogged obstinacy” could “replace freedom & inspiration.”

“The books were too valuable to be taken down”: On Undine Spragg’s treatment of her son Paul in the last chapter of The Custom of the Country, and Paul’s experience of nightmarish library in which the books can never be read, and no one ever writes.

French Fact and American Fiction: Wharton’s use of place names in The Custom of the Country.

“Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”

Part Six in a series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country.

Undine Spragg is never happy in her marriages, though she continues to be optimistic that she’ll eventually find the right man. The Custom of the Country is a novel of serial marriage, and serial divorce. Like Lorelei Lee, the heroine of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) by Anita Loos, Undine thinks that overall, American men are better than “French gentlemen,” although for a while, Paris does seem “devine” to both women. There are striking parallels between Lorelei and Undine, as Lorelei similarly travels from one city to the next, and from America to Europe, looking for happiness in status and material possessions.

Marilyn Monroe famously starred as Lorelei, the material girl living in a material world, for whom “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” in the 1953 movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. (If you follow the link and watch the clip from the song, tell me if the  ”decorative” women on the chandelier make you think of George Saunders’s story “The Semplica-Girl Diaries.” And if you haven’t read the story yet — I recommend it highly.)

In Loos’s novel, Lorelei concludes: “So I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever” (Chapter 4).

Wharton praised Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as “the great American Novel,” and her biographer R.W.B. Lewis says she was pleased to see elements of Undine’s character in Loos’s heroine. I wonder what she would think of the progression from Lorelei to Marilyn Monroe to Madonna’s “Material Girl” video.

For further reading:

Edith Wharton: A Biography, by R.W.B. Lewis (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos (New York: Penguin, 1998). (Chapter 4 of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “Paris is Devine,” also appears in the appendices in my Broadview edition of The Custom of the Country.)

Next in this series: Part Seven: “Trading Up”: Wharton’s Influence on Candace Bushnell and Julian Fellowes—Undine as a film star?

My other posts on The Custom of the Country:

Part One: How I Discovered The Custom of the Country

Part Three: “I’ll never try anything again till I try New York”

Part Four: Undine Spragg as the Empress Josephine

Part Five: Marriage, Divorce, and “diversified elements of misery”

That moment when you’re revising obsessively and it feels like “an attack of scrupulosis”…: On revising The Custom of the Country

Happy 100th Anniversary to Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country! The first installment of the novel was published in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1913.

Writing with “dogged obstinacy”: In the summer of 1911, Edith Wharton was “digging away” at her “Big Novel,” The Custom of the Country, wondering if “dogged obstinacy” could “replace freedom & inspiration.”

“The books were too valuable to be taken down”: On Undine Spragg’s treatment of her son Paul in the last chapter of The Custom of the Country, and Paul’s experience of nightmarish library in which the books can never be read, and no one ever writes.

French Fact and American Fiction: Wharton’s use of place names in The Custom of the Country.

Marriage, Divorce, and “diversified elements of misery”

Part Five in a series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country.

Edith Wharton was fascinated with marriage and divorce as subjects for fiction. She began work on The Custom of the Country in 1907, but set it aside to write two other novels. Ethan Frome was published in 1911 and The Reef was published in 1912; both explore questions about marriage and desire. In her short story “The Other Two” (1904), the heroine’s third husband ends up in an awkward situation having tea with the first two husbands.

The Custom of the Country is an extended meditation on a similar situation, as each of Undine’s husbands comes to terms with her previous marriages. The novel was published in 1913, the same year that Wharton divorced her husband of twenty-eight years. Teddy Wharton was from an old Boston family, and he had graduated from Harvard (barely), but he had very little sympathy for his wife’s literary and cultural interests.

A few years before her divorce, Edith Wharton wrote to her friend John Hugh Smith about marriage as a literary subject: “I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie—& which, consequently, is more ‘made to the hand’ of the psychologist and the dramatist?” (12 February 1909).

Here’s what the protagonist in “The Other Two,” Waythorn, thinks about his marriage: “He had fancied that a woman can shed her past like a man. But now he saw that Alice was bound to hers both by the circumstances which forced her into continued relation with it, and by the traces it had left on her nature. With grim irony Waythorn compared himself to a member of a syndicate. He held so many shares in his wife’s personality and his predecessors were his partners in the business.” Marriage and divorce as more business than passion—the custom of the country.

For further reading:

Collected Stories, 1891-1910, by Edith Wharton (New York: Library of America, 2001).

The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1988).

Next: Part Six: “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”—Undine Spragg, Lorelei Lee, Marilyn Monroe, and Madonna

My other posts on The Custom of the Country:

Part One: How I Discovered The Custom of the Country

Part Three: “I’ll never try anything again till I try New York”

Part Four: Undine Spragg as the Empress Josephine

That moment when you’re revising obsessively and it feels like “an attack of scrupulosis”…: On revising The Custom of the Country

Happy 100th Anniversary to Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country! The first installment of the novel was published in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1913.

Writing with “dogged obstinacy”: In the summer of 1911, Edith Wharton was “digging away” at her “Big Novel,” The Custom of the Country, wondering if “dogged obstinacy” could “replace freedom & inspiration.”

“The books were too valuable to be taken down”: On Undine Spragg’s treatment of her son Paul in the last chapter of The Custom of the Country, and Paul’s experience of nightmarish library in which the books can never be read, and no one ever writes.

French Fact and American Fiction: Wharton’s use of place names in The Custom of the Country.