Deborah Yaffe's Blog, page 2

How to write like Austen

Jane Austen’s writing routine: a model for us all? Apparently so, according to a new-ish book mentioned in a recent blog post. Austen is among the 161 certified geniuses – artists, writers, scientists – whose daily rituals the Harvard blogger sifted for Rules to Write By.

Among her findings: Avoid distraction. Take a daily walk. Get someone else to do the laundry.

None of it is too remarkable, but I have to say I’m a teensy bit skeptical about how it all applies to Austen.

Apart from the famous creaking-door story*, reported by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, in his 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen, we don’t really know all that much about Austen’s work routine. Which isn’t surprising, since we don’t really know all that much about anything in her life. We don't have her daily calendars, or her reflections on the best time of day to compose, or her thoughts on the relative merits of first-draft inspiration vs. second-thought revision. We're piecing together a speculative quilt out of a few stray remarks and family anecdotes.

I’ll bet it was all in those burned letters. Blame Cassandra.

* Austen-Leigh claimed that his aunt tried to conceal her writing from casual visitors by hiding it under blotting paper when the creaky door of the Chawton cottage sitting room gave her warning that someone was approaching.

This story is sometimes interpreted as proof that the oh-so-modest-and-spinsterly Jane Austen thought her writing was disreputable, or inappropriate, or unimportant. As a writer myself, however, I know how cringe-inducing it is when people ask, “Oh! What are you writing? Can I read it? Is it anything like the last one?” when the work still feels too new and fragile to share. I’d guess Jane Austen was using the creaking door to head off those conversations.

Austen on the (Indian) small screen

More international Jane Austen: an Indian TV channel is launching a show “based loosely” on Sense and Sensibility. (Not to be confused, I take it, with the Tamil-language film from 2000, Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It), which is based not-so-loosely on S&S.)

This is at least the third Indian film update of an Austen novel – in addition to I Have Found It, there’s the entertaining (2005), based on you-know -what; and the execrable (2010), a Bollywood Emma. I hope some enterprising dissertation-writer will soon address the question of why Indians -- or, at least, Indian film- and TV-viewers -- so enjoy Austen. Is it the persistence in modern Indian culture of Austen-like traditional social attitudes? The prevalence of assigned Austen texts in the British-based educational system? The lack of on-stage kissing? The footnotes practically write themselves.

Meanwhile, the new show is described as revolving around “a Punjabi matriarch. . .who runs a marriage hall and lives with the hope of seeing her two daughters. . .who're poles apart, happily married some day.” (Marriage hall? Like they said – loosely based.)

“It's a story of passionate love that anyone with a soul would be able to easily relate to,” promises the rather breathless preview that showed up on my Google alert this weekend. I’ll be waiting for the Netflix version. . .

It's probably better in the original

The other day, I ran across a nice review of Among the Janeites on a Spanish (as in, from Spain) web site, Letras con la sopa. At least, I think it’s a nice review – my Spanish comes mostly by way of high school French and college Italian, so I used the “Translate with Bing” function on my Internet Explorer browser to learn more.

Hilarity ensued.

Apparently, the reviewer enjoyed my “tone informal, almost doting and eloquently of who is drinking a coffee with a couple of friends.” She liked reading about "the passion and eccentricity of fans carrying, with pride and elegance, end caps and gowns of imperial court."

After my trip to England, “Yaffe never lost the North,” the reviewer allegedly opines. (Huh?) The book, she concludes, is “A must for fans of Jane. For others, a very effective remedy against the have.”

(Actually, that last one I deciphered on my own. She says the book is “a very effective remedy against insomnia” for non-Janeites, which seems a bit harsh – in any language.)

The headline on this review? Appropriately enough, it's "Lost in translation."

P&P & Quilts

Visitors to Jane Austen’s House Museum, fondly known as Chawton Cottage, love to admire the patchwork quilt stitched by Austen, her mother, and her sister, Cassandra.

But their handiwork has nothing on this: the Jane Austen Quilt Collection, created by Australian quilter and quilting teacher Katrina Hadjimichael. Check out her six stunning appliqued quilts, each named for a location in Pride and Prejudice: Longbourn, Netherfield, Pemberley, Hunsford, Rosings and Meryton.

As with the Jane Austen knitting patterns, the connection between quilt pattern and Austen inspiration is somewhat obscure to the uninitiated, but no matter: I look at these beautiful objects and think only, "Wish I could do that. . ."

Darcy in Lilliput

When a twelve-foot-high fiberglass statue of wet-shirt-Darcy was erected in a famed London lake last summer, it seemed the apotheosis of Janeite tackiness, not to mention a harbinger of general cultural decline.

It still does.

But it’s almost worth it just for this photo of the statue being removed from its most recent home, the lake at Lyme Park where Colin Firth’s famous scene was filmed for the BBC's 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptation.

I feel this picture cries out for a caption. “Bingley, these desperate efforts to draw me into a dance are doomed to failure. She is tolerable, but not tall enough to tempt me”? “I knew that her relations were decidedly beneath me – but nonetheless, I am shocked by the discourtesy of this reception”? “I fear that the inhabitants of this planet have peculiar notions of costume drama”?

Further suggestions welcome. . .

Timeless (and international) Austen

The tirelessly energetic, not-yet-two-year-old Jane Austen Book Club of Mumbai, India, has issued its first publication, a forty-page booklet titled “Timeless Austen.” (The contents are not online, but you can see the cover here.)

I’m delighted to be among the contributors, an eclectic mix of lay Janeites that includes an investment banker, a mechanical engineer, a high school theater teacher and a couple of teenagers, including club founder Anvita Budhraja.

Many of the articles focus on last year’s celebration of the bicentennial of Pride and Prejudice, or this year’s commemoration of the same milestone for Mansfield Park. Congratulations to the Indian Janeites on reaching a milestone of their own!

Another Janeite dream job

Last year, I briefly indulged a Janeite fantasy as I imagined plunking down a cool million dollars to buy Cassandra’s Cup, the teashop located across the street from Jane Austen House Museum, aka Chawton cottage.

Now comes news of a slightly more attainable Janeite dream job: unpaid weekend help at the cottage itself. Apparently, the museum has seen an uptick in tourist traffic with the arrival of Jane Austen’s newly purchased turquoise ring, not to mention last year’s celebration of the bicentenary of Pride and Prejudice, and assistance is called for.

Volunteers “do not need a comprehensive knowledge of Jane Austen and her work though an interest in the author is very valuable,” the newspaper announcement states.

I may qualify. Alas, however, I think the commute will be a deal-breaker.

Janeites and Disney fans

Jane Austen and Disney: it’s a nightmarish pairing. An adorably anthropomorphic Pug steals fabric from Mrs. Norris’ poor box to trim Fanny’s ballgown? The animated Elizabeth Bennet belts out a power ballad entitled “The Shades of Pemberley” after vanquishing Lady Catherine? A comically spluttering parrot plays matchmaker for Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot? The brain reels.

Yet Jane Austen – or, more accurately, Jane Austen fans – came to mind this weekend as I read Ron Suskind’s deeply moving account of how Disney films helped his autistic son break through the enforced silence and isolation of his disability.

Through the stories of Mowgli and Peter Pan, Aladdin and the Little Mermaid, Owen Suskind found a way of building relationships and understanding his experience of struggle, rejection and love. The scripted interactions of Disney characters gave him a vocabulary for his own emotions and a way to make sense of the minds of others.

Most of us don’t face Owen’s challenges in navigating the world: as children, we effortlessly absorb the lessons he had to teach himself so laboriously, with the help of devoted parents and therapists.

If Owen’s struggles are distinctive, however, his reliance on stories to give shape to the world is far from unique. In my interviews with Janeites, I heard over and over again how fans turned to Austen’s novels seeking guidance and comfort, or discovered in her pages a version of their own developmental dramas.

And, of course, it’s hardly a new insight that the DNA of Austen’s stories carries traces of the folklore and fairy tales from which Disney’s animators also take their inspiration. Fanny Price may lack a pumpkin coach and a menagerie of cute animal friends, but she’s a Cinderella figure nonetheless. That story -- about cruelty and rejection, recognition and triumph -- is a very old one.

No wonder, then, that all of us, the Owen Suskinds no less than the neurotypical, turn to narratives old and new to make sense of our human condition. The stories we tell each other – “Beauty and the Beast” as much as Sense and Sensibility – are the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves.

Book talk in Cherry Hill, NJ

Another book talk at a New Jersey library tonight! This time, I’ll be at the Cherry Hill Public Library, 1100 Kings Highway North, at 7 pm, to give a presentation and sign books.

This is the last event on my schedule at present. If you’d like me to speak to your organization or meet with your book group, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I love talking about Among the Janeites and Jane Austen. . .

Postscript to "The Watsons in Winter": Bless the Midwest!

The library gods are smiling upon us Janeites.

As I reported in my recently completed “Watsons in Winter” blog series, Jane Austen’s niece, Catherine Hubback, was the first author to turn her hand to completing Austen’s novel fragment The Watsons. In fact, Hubback’s 1850 novel The Younger Sister is the first published example of Austen fan fiction, a genre that has, to say the least, come into its own in the intervening years.

Physical copies of the book, which is long out of print, are available only in the collections of a handful of research libraries. And to date, only the first two of Hubback’s three volumes have been digitized; as I learned when I looked into the issue last year, the third volume, held by the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, was found to be too fragile to scan.

It’s a frustrating situation for Janeites intrigued by the book’s historical importance – not to mention for readers hoping to find out how Hubback wraps up her rather enjoyable plot.

But despair not: help is at hand. Last year, when I learned about the missing third volume, I contacted the library of the University of Iowa, which holds the only copy of Hubback’s novel that circulates via interlibrary loan in the United States.

Shawn Averkamp, the library’s acting head of digital research and publishing, responded promptly and positively to my email explaining the historical interest and frustrating inaccessibility of Hubback’s work.

And now comes a happy update: Averkamp tells me the library has placed its copy of Hubback’s Volume 3 in its digitization queue, and the book should be available for Google-assisted viewing in a month or so.

How cool is that? Our happy ending awaits. . .