Jane Austen discussion
This topic is about
Sense and Sensibility
General Discussion
>
Why chapter two?
date
newest »
newest »
As the eldest girls were usually named after their mothers, we may safely presume that Mrs B was also called Jane. :)
and actually... Mrs Norris herself may very well be Elizabeth. She has no kids, but she is the godmother of Fanny's sister, Betsey. So it's a safe bet.
For the men's names: there is Henries Tilney/Crawford + Emma's father is also called Henry.
Plus Mr Knightley is George... as is Wickham. And thus, I think Darcy's father was also George. Both Wickham & Georgiana were named after him.
Gosh, more and more coming out of the woodwork!!! Good point about the god-parent and the oldest child.I think we need a chart to summarise!!! :)
1)There weren't an abundance of names to choose from! You named your child usually something biblical or really classic. You couldn't make up a name back then. (Can you do that in the U.K.? You can here in the U.S.)2)Jane used a lot of family names or royal names. Frederick was one of the royal Dukes
Jane= herself
Elizabeth = Jane's sister-in-law, Elizabeth Bridges/niece
Fanny = Fanny Austen-Knight, Jane's niece, daughter of Elizabeth and James Austen (later Austen-Knight)
George=Jane's father and brother/King/Prince of Wales
Henry= Jane's favorite brother, a bit of a rogue
Charles= Jane's youngest brother/nephew
Marianne= niece
William = nephew
Frederick = Duke of York
Charlotte= Queen/Princess Royal
There is a book Jane Austen and Names and another Jane Austen's Names: Riddles, Persons, Places.
Darcy I believe comes from the Norman D'arcy. Fitzwilliam is interesting because fitz means false, often used for royal illegitimate sons... perhaps one of his ancestors was an illegitimate son of William the Conqueror?
Thank you - very enlightening! I don't personally think there was much limitation on the overall choice of names available (eg, just thinking about the Biblical names available, and classical too), but I can see why Austen would have positively enjoyed calling her characters after different members of her own family! An 'in joke' no doubt, and they were a very 'self-referencing' family I know. And I guess the royal connection was also a good idea for an author, as it would 'give credibility' for readers etc (and a bit of class!))Thank you for the links provided.
As for making up names in the UK, well, the famous one is Wendy, which comes, from what I read, from J M Barrie's Peter Pan, and there is another famous one, Shirley, which is a town, I think, somewhere 'up north', which Charlotte Bronte used for her eponymous heroine. (Shirley has gone right out of fashion now - it used to be popular in my youth.)
These days, sigh, 'made up' names are becoming increasingly common, but they are VERY 'low class'!!!!!! It's almost a given that anyone with a made up name is NOT 'from the best circles'.....
In fact, there was a teacher a while back who got into trouble in the press and social media for writing that when she gets her class list at the beginning of the academic year she can immediate 'place' her students according to their names.
As ever in Britain, class infiltrates almost everywhere, and we just LOVE classifying people on every and every ground possible! From what they call napkins/serviettes, to what their first names are - and, most of all, of course, how they pronounce the English language! It's our national obsession!
PS - another 'new' way of telling someone's class before they even open their mouth etc, is by counting their tattoos. The more they have, the lower class they are.....
Beth-In-UK wrote: "PS - another 'new' way of telling someone's class before they even open their mouth etc, is by counting their tattoos. The more they have, the lower class they are....."Ditto for peircings!
Ewww!
In terms of names, there was an article reproduced in the British tabloids recently (probably the Daily Mail, as that's the one I can access online for free!) (I balance it by reading the Guardian as well!!!!), from a survey conducted in the USA, which had lists of names according to popularity in ethnic/cultural groups. The Hispanic (Latino?) (apols, but as a Brit I'm not sure what the difference, if any, is?) ones were pretty easy to identify ecause they were so obviously Spanish in style, eg, often ended in 'ez' or 'esa' etc!), but it was less easy to see which ones were likely to be from Black communities (Afro-American, is that the right term?) (In the UK, we tend to say 'Afro-Caribbean', and subsume all 'non-Caucasians' as BAME - Black, Asian and Middle Eastern) (it's a bit of a minefield, for obvious reasons, as no one wishes to give offence, even inadvertently, as a recent spat over whether 'coloured' is pejorative but 'person of colour' is not, plus of course the terms that are acceptable/non-acceptable change over time - definitely a minefield).
However, what struck me most was the identification of what the article called 'the whitest names'.....they were very Germanic.
Add to that the fact that names go in and out of fashion with the generations, and it can get pretty complicated!
Beth - It's not that easy to tell which names are Latinx or African-American, particularly African-American because slaves had the names of their white owners and some chose their own names when they became free. Latinx names often end in -ez but not always and you can't always tell who is Latinx either. There are a lot of mixed race people in the Caribbean and when they come here speaking Spanish it can be confusing because your eyes see a person with dark skin and your ears hear Spanish. A good example is former Boston Red Sox player David "Big Papi" Ortiz. He's from the Dominican Republic and has dark skin. His native language is Spanish.White names can be any ethnicity at all. I live in a mill city and many French-Canadian immigrants came to work in the mills. They spoke French and maintained their identities. Irish workers came to work in the mills and elsewhere during the potato famine and Italians came during the turn-of-the-20th-century. A lot of Southeast Asians, many Latinx, and Israeli Jews have come more recently. Where I live, it's unusual to see names like Smith, Jones, etc. I do have relatives named Smith. They're from the South but they identify more with their mother's Italian heritage.
In the Midwest you have a lot of Scandinavians and Germans. Everyone from the East coast went West on wagon trains, the Transcontinental Railroad in the 19th century.
Gosh, it does sound incredibly complicated, doesn't it? I guess, by definition, if your entire population is (Amerindians aside) 'immigrant' (including 'non-voluntary', alas), you are going to get a much denser mesh of complexity, both with a lot of travelling and internal migration over time, and with intermarriages.I do feel, somewhat sadly, that with modern mass culture (ie, film/tv/social media etc), there is increasing influence from that, rather than from one's own families, so it's getting harder to see 'lines of descent' so to speak from family names, than it used to be.
In a way, though, that 'obscuring of origins' is countered by the development of DNA testing, so that we can, irrespective of names/family history and even 'visible appearance' get an amazing insight into our 'invisible history' in our DNA.
I have a friend who gave her Jewish husband a kit, and it turns out he is 100% Ashkenazi Jew.....absolutely NO ONE in his family ever 'married out'!
PS - You say Latinx - I've not heard that term before - does it mean 'Hispanic-Latino' then? As in, anyone living in the Americas with any Spanish descent (either culturally or genetically?)
People with heritage from Spanish speaking countries, at least the ones I know, prefer Latino/a or when speaking in general of both sexes Latinx. Some people just say "Spanish" when they mean Latin Americans Spanish speakers. Hispanic is an older term. Mexican-Americans from Texas also sometimes use Chicano/a. That's about the extent of my knowledge. Living in the city is very different from the suburbs where I grew up even though they're only a few miles apart.
Ah, thank you - that makes sense. Strangely, in a neat example of synchronicity (!), I actually read a newspaper article yesterday about Hispanic supporters of Trump (the thesis is that those from conservative value families can actually be more Trump Republican than Democrat, ie, 'voting against expectations', ) and the term 'Latinx'' was referred to - not very flatteringly, I may add, as it was disparaged as a 'woke' term! (Oh dear, 'woke'....in itself a 'woke' term I suspect, and, as ever today's 'PC' is tomorrow's 'non-PC' etc etc - the whole names and labels issue is a horrendous minefield at the moment (and perhaps always has been, sigh)As ever 'outsiders to a group' (whoever the group and the outsiders are!!!), tend probably to 'over-homogenise' the group, without understanding or acknowledging the 'fine tuning' within a group. An example from the UK might be the 'outsider' assumption that all 'working class people' (and I'm not even going to attempt to define that!!!)(another minefield!) are 'Labour voters', whereas there are a significant number who are 'Tory voters', etc etc.
Perhaps the only 'constant' is that the one thing we know about humanity is that we seem to have an unquenchable desire to both form groups, and re-form them all over again quite differently! Hey ho!
Beth-In-UK wrote: "Perhaps the only 'constant' is that the one thing we know about humanity is that we seem to have an unquenchable desire to both form groups, and re-form them all over again quite differently! Hey ho!."
I think this is something Jane Austen knew well and did so skillfully. She liked to play around poking fun at the construction of social class. She had good insight into human nature and that's why her books are so relatable 200 years later.
Indeed! Our own lives reflected back at us.
Jane Austen
Books mentioned in this topic
Jane Austen and Names (other topics)Jane Austen's Names: Riddles, Persons, Places (other topics)
Lady Susan (other topics)
The Watsons (other topics)
Sanditon (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Hannah More (other topics)Frances Burney (other topics)
Walter Scott (other topics)
Rudyard Kipling (other topics)
Paula Byrne (other topics)
'Kitty' in P&P would also be 'K/Catherine' in full.
Thinking about first names a bit more, it's also striking that there are a good few characters that we know only by their surnames! I don't think we ever find out what Mr and Mrs Bennet's first names are, do we?
To modern ears, it always sounds so weird that married people refer to each other by their surnames! I wonder when that finally went out of practice?
Another 'aural oddity' to us is saying 'my mother/father/aunt/uncle' etc when talking to another character who is also the daughter/niece etc! eg, Lizzy saying to Jane 'my mother's nerves....' (or whatever). These days we'd obviously say 'our mother's nerves'.....
It's as if Lizzie is implying that Jane has a different mother! Very odd.