Deborah Yaffe's Blog, page 3
February 27, 2014
Goofy Austen News; or, Any Link to Jane Will Do
There are weeks when all you hear about Jane Austen is staid, decorous stuff: the prospect of a new film adaptation, or the exhibit of a beloved family heirloom, or the sale of a semi-authentic portrait.
Then there are other weeks when the weirdness quotient gets pretty overwhelming. This was such a week.
Item #1: A mahogany sofa that once belonged to Tom Lefroy is up for auction. (It may have been reupholstered once or twice in the intervening years, since the fabric is described as "Art Nouveau.")
Lefroy, the Daily Mail informs us, “is believed to have provided the inspiration” for Mr. Darcy. The headline drops all qualifiers, making Lefroy the flat-out “real-life Mr. Darcy.”
It’s such a lovely story that one hates to point out that Jane Austen had a crush on Tom Lefroy for about two weeks when she was twenty and then probably never saw him again. Or that the Lefroy-inspired-Darcy meme is mostly based on an Anne Hathaway movie.
Or that Mr. Darcy is a phenomenally wealthy landowner, has only one sister, and standoffishly refuses to dance at a neighborhood ball, whereas Tom Lefroy was a struggling apprentice lawyer, had ten siblings, and danced with Jane Austen so often that her sister warned her to be more discreet.
Item #2: A town where Jane Austen once. . .shopped. . . plans to create an Austen heritage trail in order to lure the tourists visiting a nearby gin factory. It's hard to believe no one has previously capitalized on the near-perfect overlap between gin fans and Jane fans.
But still -- one wonders: will true Jane fans spend their time in Overton, a place with minimal Austen links, rather than driving half an hour to Chawton, a place with substantial Austen links?
And the biggest question of all: who on earth is that meek, sweet-faced woman in the bonnet – Jane Austen’s little-known Quaker cousin?
February 24, 2014
Martin Amis: Saved by Jane Austen
I’m not a Martin Amis fan – The Rachel Papers so repulsed me that I’ve never cracked open another of his novels – but this interview warmed my heart.
Surely no Janeite could resist the picture of a troubled teenager – a boy, no less! – rescued from despair by the utterly compelling story of Pride and Prejudice. I’m a sucker for tales about how books save lives.
We live in the wake of a thousand movies designed to amp up Austen’s girly-romance quotient, so it’s always worth remembering how much she has to offer people who don’t fit the popular stereotype of Austen fans. Narrative drive, engrossing characterization, crystalline prose -- she's got something for everyone.
I’ve never read anything by novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, the far-from-wicked stepmother who threw young Martin the lifeline of fiction when he most needed it, but I feel I should add her to my list.
February 20, 2014
Vicariously visiting Jane Austen's England
This summer, the Jane Austen Society of North America will once again sponsor a tour of Austen sites in England – the places she lived, the places she set her novels, the places standing in for those places in movies made from her novels. Alas, I will not be along for the ride.
Three years ago, I combined business with pleasure by spending a big chunk of my Among the Janeites book advance on JASNA’s Sense and Sensibility bicentennial tour (chapter 2 in the finished book). This year: no advance, no chapter to write, no Mansfield Park bicentennial trip. No chance to visit Portsmouth and Northamptonshire and the house where Patricia Rozema filmed her idiosyncratic 1999 version of the novel. Sigh.
Luckily, it’s possible to vicariously enjoy some of the thrills of a JASNA England tour by browsing in the pages of Walking Jane Austen’s London, a 2013 guidebook by Louise Allen, the author of dozens of romance novels, many of them set in Regency England.
Allen divides well-traveled tourist districts of the city into eight walking tours of roughly two miles, each one laid out in a chapter that includes an easy-to-follow map, modern photographs and period prints from Allen’s own collection.
The walks take in not only sites associated with the Austen family (Henry Austen’s bank on Henrietta Street, the house in Hans Place where Jane visited him during Eliza’s final illness) but also shops, theaters and monuments that figured in Regency life. The wistful American reader can stroll in imagination through Mayfair and Soho, Kensington and Marylebone, stopping for tea (the drink) at Twining’s or tea (the meal) at Fortnum & Mason.
It all makes for an inexpensive but tantalizing mental vacation, an entertaining series of mini-history lessons, and a reminder of why we’d all rather be reading Jane Austen. . . in London.
February 17, 2014
Next book talk: Princeton, NJ
My next book event is very close to home: at my local synagogue, in fact.
I’ll be speaking to the book club of the Jewish Center, 435 Nassau Street in Princeton, NJ, on Tuesday, February 18. The meeting – which is open to the public – begins at 7:30 pm, but I’ll show up around 7:45 pm, to give attendees a chance to say what they really thought.
If you're interested in having me visit your book club, please check out the Book Club page of this web site. And if your book club meets in Manhattan or Brooklyn, check out Book the Writer, an interesting new venture that arranges for authors -- including me -- to visit book clubs discussing their work.
February 13, 2014
Wrapping up The Watsons in Winter
“Each of us has a private Austen,” Karen Joy Fowler writes at the beginning of The Jane Austen Book Club, her 2004 novel about how fiction changes lives. Romance, social satire, feminist polemic, literary comfort food – every reader finds something different in Austen’s pages.
That insight, which became one of the themes of my book Among the Janeites, came to mind as I looked back on the ten continuations of Jane Austen’s novel fragment The Watsons, which I’ve reviewed for the past five weeks in my “Watsons in Winter” blog series.
February 10, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: Jennifer Ready Bettiol
Some Jane Austen fan fiction is produced by professional writers with one eye on a potentially profitable market. But much Austen fan fiction is written by non-professionals – readers, essentially – who revere Jane Austen and want to lay a gift at the feet of the master.
As literature, the results do not always succeed. But as expressions of love, they are often rather touching.
Such is Jennifer Ready Bettiol’s 2012 completion of The Watsons, the subject of today’s post in my “Watsons in Winter” blog series. It’s an undercooked wrap-up of Austen’s fragment – Bettiol's additions consume fewer pages than Austen’s brief original, creating a work that is “more novella than novel,” as Bettiol herself admits – but it’s also a sincere act of homage and, as such, something every Janeite can appreciate.
February 6, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: Eucharista Ward
Jane Austen’s life was steeped in religion. As the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, she almost certainly believed in God, attended church regularly, and knew the Bible well. She wrote three overtly Christian prayers and was buried in an Anglican cathedral, under a stone bearing an epitaph that mentions her religious faith twice and her novel-writing not at all.
But little of the religious context of Austen’s life and times can be discerned in the pages of her books. Although her stories chronicle her characters’ moral development, she virtually never gives this growth an overtly spiritual dimension. Austen’s heroes and heroines do not seek divine help in adversity, pray for suffering friends, or turn to the Bible for comfort.
The heroine of Eucharista Ward’s The Watsons Revisited, the subject of today’s post in my “Watsons in Winter” blog series, does all of those things. Ward’s version of The Watsons springs from a religious sensibility that, if not stronger than Austen’s own, is at any rate more demonstrative in its expression.
Consequently, while Ward’s completion of Austen’s novel fragment isn’t great literature, it’s nevertheless an interesting prism through which to refract the question of Austen’s religious faith.
February 3, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: Helen Baker
News flash: it’s hard to write like Jane Austen.
I don’t just mean that it’s hard to emulate Austen’s diamond-bright sentences, with their elegant phrasing and tiny, hidden time-bombs of irony. (Although it is.) I mean that it’s hard to recount the more-or-less unexceptional events of daily life and yet make that ordinariness as compelling as any swashbuckling melodrama.
Thus it is that Helen Baker’s 2008 book The Watsons By Jane Austen and Another Lady, the subject of today’s installment in my “Watsons in Winter” blog series, manages to turn a series of ordinary events into. . . not much more than a series of ordinary events. The result isn’t unremittingly terrible – but it’s a reminder that what looks so effortless in Jane Austen’s hands is very, very difficult indeed.
January 30, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: Merryn Williams
Merryn Williams’ completion of The Watsons, Jane Austen’s fragment of a novel, is a modest undertaking.
With new material that runs only slightly longer than the brief original, Williams’ version -- the subject of today’s post in my "Watsons in Winter" blog series -- stakes no great claim to breadth, depth, or originality. No new characters erupt into Austen’s story; no unexpected plot twists deform the expected course of events.
And yet, this very modesty is disarming, even appealing. By the time Williams’ conclusion rolled around, I found myself a bit sorry to bid her characters goodbye.
January 27, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: Joan Aiken
Joan Aiken’s books were among the delights of my childhood – propulsive, plot-driven novels in the Gothic spirit of Victorian classics like The Woman in White, but written in language more accessible to the tween set.
I adored The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (plucky girls menaced by heartless adults, while furry predators howl outside in the snow), and I still vividly remember the factory in Midnight Is a Place, where child laborers pick lint off carpets and sprint to safety moments before a heavy pressing plate descends to crush them.
So imagine my joy when I learned that the insanely prolific Aiken, author of more than one hundred books for children and adults, had a sideline in Jane Austen spinoffs. She wrote six -- sequels to Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma and Mansfield Park, as well as a 1996 completion of Austen’s fragment The Watsons, the subject of today’s post in my "Watsons in Winter" blog series.
The result may not quite merit the rosy glow of my childhood memories, but it’s a breezy and good-humored novel, albeit one that owes less to Austen than to the Victorian novelists Aiken so often emulated.
