Deborah Yaffe's Blog, page 4
January 23, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: David Hopkinson ("Another")
What is it with the extended Hubback clan? They just can’t seem to get enough of Jane Austen’s fragment The Watsons.
The first person to continue The Watsons was Catherine Anne Austen Hubback, Jane Austen’s niece, with her 1850 novel The Younger Sister. Seventy-eight years later came Catherine’s granddaughter, Edith Hubback Brown, with a radically abridged version of Hubback’s novel that, Brown argued, hewed closer to Austen’s intentions.
And forty-nine years after that came yet another Hubback family production, which is the subject of today’s post in my “Watsons in Winter” blog series: a completion of The Watsons coyly attributed to “Jane Austen and Another." Despite the official cloak of anonymity, it seems to have been an open secret in Janeite circles that the author was David Hopkinson, the husband of Diana Hubback, a niece of Edith Brown.
Like Brown, Hopkinson aimed not to imagine his own ending to The Watsons but rather to rewrite Hubback’s novel, stripping away her subplots and dated interventions to allow what he perceived as a more Austen-like book to emerge.
Since we can’t know what Austen would have written had she ever returned to The Watsons, it’s hard to know how well Hopkinson succeeds in this effort. What’s clear is that his book is only partially successful as a novel in its own right.
January 20, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: John Coates
Jane Austen was not perfect. Not every sentence that fell from her pen was a masterpiece; like all of us, she needed an editor’s eye from time to time. And the 17,000-plus words of The Watsons, the novel she abandoned a decade or more before her death, probably lack the layers of polish that her revisions would have applied.
But let’s face it: she was a genius, and when you edit genius – even unfinished genius -- you proceed with care. Unless you too are a genius, most of the time, your edits aren’t going to be improvements.
I couldn’t avoid these reflections as I made my way through John Coates’ 1958 continuation of The Watsons, the subject of today’s post in my "Watsons in Winter" blog series. Coates was a professional novelist and playwright, and his continuation is far from terrible. His grasp of pacing and characterization is much surer than that of some of his predecessors in the Watsons-continuation game.
But an avid Janeite can’t repress a momentary shock on reaching Coates’ afterword, in which he forthrightly admits, “I have altered the original fragment.” His goal, he explains, was to replace words whose meaning seemed obscure to modern ears; to introduce more wit and sparkle than Jane Austen’s original included; and to prune for length. The results show that Coates, while by no means a bad writer, just wasn’t a genius.
January 16, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: Edith Hubback Brown
Less than two sentences into her preface, Edith Hubback Brown is already asserting her genetic right to complete Jane Austen’s fragment The Watsons. “I will not apologise. I like my great-aunt Jane, and she would have liked me,” Brown writes, with an absolute certainty that will sound familiar to other Janeites equally convinced that only an accident of history prevented them from becoming Austen’s closest confidant.
“She would have said, ‘I am pleased with your notion, and expect much entertainment,’ ” Brown continues. “Solemn people can say, if they like, that we should not do this, but I decline to be solemn about Aunt Jane. She was fun, much more than she was anything else, and this has been fun to do.”
I do not begrudge Edith Hubback Brown her harmless fun. Alas, however, her 1928 continuation, the subject of today’s post in my "Watsons in Winter" blog series, is not much of a book. Although in outline it closely tracks a previous Watsons continuation -- The Younger Sister, by Brown's grandmother, Catherine Hubback, the subject of an earlier "Watsons in Winter" blog post -- Brown drains Hubback's original of much of its charm. Brown's writing is adequate and even shows occasional flashes of wit, but her story is rushed and her characters one-dimensional. Novelistic talent may not be genetic after all.
January 13, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: L. Oulton
Catherine Hubback, the first person to try her hand at a completion of Jane Austen’s fragment The Watsons, is no longer an entirely obscure figure: her Austen family connections, her Austen-linked literary effort, and her own intrepid life have gained her a fair amount of scholarly attention.
Not so L. Oulton, the author of the next Watsons continuation, which appeared in 1923, seventy-three years after Hubback’s, and which is the subject of today’s post in my "Watsons in Winter" blog series.
That indeterminate first initial gives no clue to as basic a matter as gender, but, on the whole, it seems likely that Oulton was female: several contemporaneous reviews of The Watsons, Concluded, including this one, refer to its author as “Miss Oulton," as does David Gilson, in his Austen bibliography. (She was so little known, though, that thirty-five years later, another Watsons continuer, John Coates, offhandedly assumes his predecessor was male.)
All I’ve been able to glean from an Internet search is the fact that Oulton, whoever she was, also wrote a collection of sensational stories, Exceeding Pleasant and Other Sketches, published in 1913, ten years before the Austen continuation. Perhaps Marina Cano López, the author of an as-yet-unpublished dissertation on Watsons completions, has discovered more; I’m eager to read her work once it becomes available.
In the meantime, it would be satisfyingly romantic to report that the mysterious Oulton is a neglected genius whose noble work has been unaccountably overlooked by history. Unfortunately, the reality is a bit more prosaic. The Watsons, Concluded is limp and unsatisfying -- the outline of a novel, rather than a fully fleshed-out tale.
The writing veers from serviceable Austen pastiche to histrionic tripe (“How little did he realize that his idle words were as a naked sword in her breast”), and the story is far more tell than show. Scenes and incidents are summarized without dialogue to dramatize them; people come and go without advancing either character development or plot.
Some of that plot – the death of Emma Watson’s father, her life with her grasping brother and sister-in-law, Emma's romance with Mr. Howard and Lady Osborne’s unrequited passion for him – follow the storyline that Jane Austen is said to have planned. Other elements – a sleazy con artist’s pursuit of Emma, Mr. Howard’s trip to Italy with the Osbornes – seem flamboyantly un-Austenian. (And, indeed, for all the Italian atmosphere Oulton manages to summon, the Osbornes might as well have stayed at home in Surrey.)
The book is sentimental in ways that Jane Austen never was. Oulton makes Emma’s niece, little Augusta Watson, the daughter of the execrable Robert and Jane, a cherub “with much more natural refinement than either her father or her mother,” rather than the spoiled brat that Austen, the creator of Lady Middleton and her tantrum-throwing toddler, Annamaria, would more likely have envisioned.
And in the melodramatic backstory that Lady Osborne implausibly shares with Mr. Howard, Oulton's writing conjures the extravagantly insincere heroines of Austen’s “Love and Freindship,” that hilarious sendup of the sentimental novel. I couldn’t help giggling as Lady Osborne's narrative piled catastrophe upon catastrophe: “Not long afterward my father died from an accident. The shock brought a stroke on my mother, depriving her of the power of speech, which she never afterward recovered. . . . As it was seldom possible to leave her, I could see but little of my children, for as the Dower House was small, and indifferently built, she could not endure their noise.”
But that moment of unintentional levity isn’t enough to redeem the whole. Ultimately, The Watsons, Concluded remains as shadowy and insubstantial as its author.
L. Oulton. The Watsons, Concluded. London: Hutchinson and Co.,1923.
January 9, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: Catherine Hubback
The first-ever completion of Jane Austen’s fragment The Watsons – Catherine Hubback’s 1850 novel The Younger Sister, the subject of today’s post in my "Watsons in Winter" blog series – occupies a special place in Janeite lore. It is the first published Austen fan fiction, the founding mother of a genre whose exemplars now fill groaning shelves in bookstores everywhere.
Because Hubback was Jane Austen’s niece, albeit too young to have known Austen personally, it’s also tempting to speculate that Hubback's completion incorporates what older relatives told her about Austen’s own plans for her unfinished story. And aside from its historical interest, Hubback’s book is solidly entertaining in its own right: not as good as Jane Austen, of course (what is?), but an often well-written, middle-brow Victorian novel.
It’s truly a shame, then, that most Janeites currently have little chance of reading The Younger Sister in its entirety. Long out of print, the book apparently now exists only in the collections of seven libraries: one in Australia, two in the United States, and four in Great Britain. One of the American libraries does not make its copy available for interlibrary loan, leaving a single copy to circulate among all American Janeites who may wish to read it.
In the age of Google Books, the solution to this problem seems obvious, and, indeed, the first two volumes of Hubback’s three-volume novel – each more than three hundred octavo pages long – have for years been available on line, in digital copies made from the edition owned by Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.
But not the third volume. “Unfortunately when volume 3 reached the scanning room it was found to be too fragile for scanning,” a Bodleian representative informed me via email last year. (Buyers, beware: a past Amazon offering purporting to be volume III is apparently volume II.)
Consequently, I have not yet been able to read the end of Hubback’s novel. Volume II finishes on a cliffhanger – will plucky, virtuous Emma Watson escape the clutches of smooth, seductive Mr. Morgan, whose intentions seem distinctly dishonorable? – and the happy ending remains just over the horizon. It's a frustrating roadblock for anyone interested in the history of Watsons continuations.
January 6, 2014
The Watsons in Winter
The Watsons, the novel Jane Austen started and then abandoned on the cusp of her thirties, is a wintry book: not, perhaps, in its chronology – the story starts in October – but in its mood.
In a swift fifty-five pages, most likely written in Bath in 1804, Austen sketches a middle-class family trembling on the edge of economic disaster – an ailing father, four single daughters with few marital prospects, and two sons whose fledgling professional lives are shadowed by the knowledge that they may soon have to support their spinster sisters.
The nineteen-year-old heroine, Emma Watson, is an outsider in her own home – unceremoniously packed off to her family after fourteen years in the household of an aunt whose brand-new husband has decided to renege on the implied promise of a home and a dowry.
The Watsons seems likely to feature plenty of Austen humor, stemming from both the naiveté of the good-hearted Emma (“Rivalry, treachery between sisters!” she exclaims in astonishment when she hears how one of her siblings scotched the marital prospects of another) and the excesses of such secondary characters as the shallow, social-climbing sister-in-law, Jane; the whiny and hypocritical younger sister, Margaret; and the flirtatious Tom Musgrave, playing wingman for the standoffish Lord Osborne. Behind these shadowy beginnings of characters, we glimpse the familiar, well-loved figures of Mrs. Elton and Mary Musgrove, Frank Churchill and Mr. Darcy.
But despite the flashes of wit (Margaret, hearing she won’t have to share her room with Emma, is “rather mortified to find she was not ill-used”), the prevailing mood is dark. Barely acquainted with her closest relations, Emma struggles with feelings of loneliness and rejection and sadly discovers that the fierce competition for survival and social advantage has embittered many of the people she left behind. In places, the fragment reads like the first romantic comedy written by Hobbes.
January 2, 2014
It's that time of year again
New Year’s Resolutions for Janeites
1. Adopt Mr. Woodhouse’s macrobiotic/vegan diet.
“The wedding-cake. . .had been a great distress to him. . . . His own stomach could bear nothing rich.”
2. Join Elizabeth Bennet’s gym.
“She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an excellent walker.”
3. Follow Lady Bertram’s sleep schedule.
“Sunk back in one corner of the sofa. . . just falling into a gentle doze. . .”
4. Use Sir Walter Elliot’s budgeting software.
“They must retrench; that did not admit of a doubt.”
5. Undertake Marianne Dashwood’s stress-management program.
“I have laid down my plan, and if I am capable of adhering to it, my feelings shall be governed and my temper improved.”
6. Tackle Catherine Morland’s TBR pile.
“Are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”
7. Embrace Lady Susan Vernon’s approach to me-time.
“I am tired of submitting my will to the caprices of others.”
December 30, 2013
Jane Austen's 2013
For someone who’s been dead since 1817, Jane Austen had a pretty good year in 2013.
She was honored with a set of UK stamps, and her image was chosen for a forthcoming British bank note. A not-particularly-accurate portrait of her sold at auction for more than $270,000, and a turquoise ring she’d owned was acquired by her museum from an American singer. A popular novelist rewrote Sense and Sensibility, while a political scientist found elements of game theory in all her books. And holiday gift-buyers scarfed up Austenesque tattoos weeks before Britain’s Christmastime TV viewers enjoyed a mystery-themed visit to the Darcy family at Pemberley.
A wildly popular web series called "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries" finished its run and won an Emmy. The annual Austen festivals in Louisville, Kentucky, and Bath, England, attracted droves of fans, unlike the appalling film Austenland, which justly flopped. And all year long – including in September, at the Minneapolis meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America -- the world celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen was good to me this year, too: in August, my book, Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom, was published. Many thanks to all the interviewers, bloggers and readers who’ve talked about the book – it’s been a great pleasure to see my work connect with fellow fans of our author.
Here’s to an equally good Janeite year in 2014! Hey, all you fans of Mansfield Park (published 1814) – this is your moment. . .
December 26, 2013
Happy holidays to me. . .
A lovely Christmas present: Austenprose names Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom the top Austen-inspired non-fiction book of 2013!
Laurel Ann Nattress’ blog is a key gathering-spot for readers of Austen-related books, both fiction and non-fiction, and I was thrilled to get a wonderful review from her when Among the Janeites was published last summer.
Thanks, Laurel Ann, for this further vote of confidence!
December 23, 2013
Christmas Anglophilia
I don’t think I’m really an Anglophile – although it’s true that, if money were no object, I would certainly retire to a charming pied-à-terre in London’s Chelsea neighborhood, where I would spend long days reading nineteenth-century British novels and eating Thornton’s chocolates. (In this fantasy, calories are no object, either.)
But the time of year in which I come closest to Anglophilia is Christmas. Not because of Scrooge and Tiny Tim, but because of Christmas TV.
In the UK, Christmas is primo TV time, the season when broadcasters roll out their most tempting, sinfully indulgent programming – the brand new, two-hour episodes of beloved series; the adaptations of popular books, starring legions of fantastic character actors; the first television showings of blockbuster films. It’s the time of year when the family lays in a good supply of sherry trifle and Thornton's chocolates and gathers round the glowing electronic hearth to celebrate the holiday in style.
You may have noticed that this is not what happens here in the US. For us, Christmas is a television wasteland in which viewers wander amid various dispiritingly stale options: football games, colorized versions of ancient Christmas movies, Downton Abbey reruns, that weird show with the burning Yule log. . . . Apparently, our broadcasters expect us to spend our holidays far from the tube, gorging on goodies and fighting with our relatives.
This year, while we are gorging and fighting, our fortunate British friends will be watching both the Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James’ mystery-novel sequel to Pride and Prejudice; and Christmas episode. I don’t have high hopes for Death Comes to Pemberley – the TV trailer looked campy, and not necessarily intentionally so – but I’ll take Mr. Darcy over the Yule log any day of the week.
It may be time to start pricing pieds-à-terre in Chelsea.
