Old Grey Pony

New Stables

2007-11-11T17:43:00.000-08:00

Old Grey Pony has moved.

Chez Grey is now Old Grey Pony at WordPress

See you on the other side of the paddock.

Accident and Coincidence in Persuasion. Part Two.

2007-09-03T17:29:00.000-07:00

It is during the significant turning point of Persuasion’s storyline, the visit to Lyme, that the accidents of Uppercross come to a head, and where the strands of the web holding Wentworth close to Louisa Musgrove and away from Anne shift and snap in their course. The visit to Lyme heralds the closing of the country setting and the opening of the Bath one, and the change from country accidents to town coincidences.

The climax of the bond between Louisa and Wentworth, a frenzy of school-girlish admiration on her side and careless enjoyment on his, comes in the form of Persuasion’s most significant accident, Louisa’s near tragic fall on the Cobb at Lyme. The intimacy between Wentworth and Louise is child like and during their walks around Uppercross ‘he had had to jump her from the stiles’ as ‘the sensation was delightful to her’. From the steps on the Cobb Louisa insists Wentworth catches her, which he does, but a second, too precipitous jump leaves her seriously injured, concussed, unconscious for a period and bedridden during a long convalescence at Lyme. Louisa’s accident puts crucial developments into motion, realizations and reactions that pull Wentworth away from her and towards Anne:

…he had seen everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost; and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way

Louisa’s obstinacy in jumping despite warnings of danger and Anne’s quick thinking and sensible reactions to the emergency, his feelings of guilt and responsibility and the group’s assuming there to be agreement between himself and Louisa force Wentworth to analyze his actions of the past few weeks, and to acknowledge his obligation to Louisa even while he confronts the reality that he is still very much in love with Anne, but honor bound to Louisa.

But as Louisa recovers she begins to fall in love with, and to be loved by, Captain Benwick. Benwick’s fiancé had died the previous summer while he was at sea, an accidental chance that left Benwick broken hearted and in need of healing himself. And though he could not be at the sickbed of Fanny Harville, he could be by Louisa Musgrove’s. The quiet, nervous girl that Louisa emerges as is the patient that Benwick can nurse, and the bookish, intelligent and kind Captain is exactly the man to now capture her heart. The news of their engagement frees Wentworth of any obligation and propels him to Bath in search of Anne, her love and her hand. But in Bath he also finds a man the narrative had introduced ever so teasingly, by coincidence of course, at Lyme: Anne’s estranged cousin Mr Elliot.

To be continued.

Progess. It's Mighty Satisfying.

2007-08-25T21:24:00.000-07:00

I am back from our sojourn on Salt Spring Island, where you can be sure that though I got in many Austen style long country walks, the activities mostly boiled down to sitting around doing nothing but eating, drinking and basking in the sun and occasionally foraging for sun warmed blackberries, peaches, apples and figs. A city dweller has to make the most of fresh fruit, fresh air and sea breezes after all but it was my birthday and I celebrated by sitting down an awful lot and partaking of our host's fine beverages and cheeses. I really am quite amazed by how much a person can put away when they're on holiday, it's like psychological appetite enhancement.

I must humbly ask that my dear readership, parva sed apta, stand by me with angelic patience while I take yet a little more time off from writing. After more than twelve months of worry, of fussing about with paperwork, of pushing forward blind and not really knowing where were going and lamenting not having a lawyer, I've recently been notified that next week I am being granted my Canadian residency, for as some of you already know I'm Australian and married to a Canuck. My residency will finally allow me to work, study and leave the country. Though I'm just across the border in Vancouver I haven't been able to visit America in almost two years and I'll tell you, the stores in Seattle that carry Tom's Shoes and Ethiopian coffee beans and competitively priced liquor are not going to know what hit them. Me. In a caffeine fueled, Tom's wearing shopping frenzy with my Seattle based sister in law. (Hi Dieringers!)

But that's for later. Right now I need a little time to prepare for my entré into Canadian Residency. I'll still be manning Old Grey Pony as before when I've gotten myself organized. In the meantime, here's a few points of interest.

Many Books is a fantastic resource from which you can download many books in PDF, eBook or iPod Notes format, and from where I just acquired some long desired works of Elizabeth von Arnim.
Many readers of Jane Austen's novels and short stories enjoy a dive into the dubious world of Austen film and TV adaptations and I'm not immune to an occasional dip myself. I have seen every, and I mean every, adaptation and the only ones I can recommend unreservedly are Persuasion 1995 (Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds) and Northanger Abbey 1986 (Peter Firth and Katharine Schlesinger).
It has nothing to do with Austen but I think Indexed is adorable. Enjoy.

Back in a week or so.

Thanks for reading.

-Rebecca

Short Haitus

2007-08-17T02:13:00.000-07:00

Mr Hasenauer and I are getting out of the city for a few days and will be on holiday on Salt Spring Island, rusticating in a wee cabin on a vineyard.

Posts will begin again shortly on the 25th of August.

Extra Long Georgian Item of the Week

2007-08-14T08:28:00.000-07:00

Emma, Lady Hamilton
c. 1765 - 1815

Study of Emma Hart as Circe
circa 1782-85
George Romney
Tate Gallery, London

One of the most scandalous relationships of Georgian England was the devoted alliance between Emma, Lady Hamilton and the hero of the nation, Horatio Nelson. Like any public and unconventional woman, an inordinate amount has been written about Lady Hamilton, much of it unflattering and most of it untrue. The daughter of a Blacksmith, Emma, born Amy Lyon in Cheshire circa 1761-5, at the age of sixteen or seventeen was a most ravishingly beautiful girl who had become the full time mistress of the Hon. Charles Greville in London after having been very lately abandoned pregnant by her former lover Sir Harry Fetherstonehaugh. Before her entry into the demi-monde Lyon worked as nursemaid in two or three private houses. Greville set her and her widowed mother up in their own home and Amy Lyon thereafter went by the more upwardly mobile name of Mrs Emma Hart. Her daughter Emma Carew was brought up by her grandmother in Wales.

During the five years she lived with Greville, Emma sat more than 100 times for the painter George Romney. Though a majority of these sittings were by Romney's obsessive desire, many of them were commissioned by Greville and it was the cost of these portraits that helped contribute to the massive personal debts that forced Greville to give Emma up in 1786 in search of a wealthy bride. Greville sent her to Naples to be the guest of his uncle Sir William Hamilton, leading vulcanologist and British Envoy to Naples and a widower, with the expressed plan of following her shortly. In reality Greville intended to remain in England and marry an heiress, and that the fascinating, charismatic presence and angelic, Grecian beauty of Emma would prevent the already fond Sir William from remarrying elsewhere and thereby disinheriting him. After months of waiting faithfully for Greville, the reality of her situation dawned on her and Emma became instead Sir William's mistress, whom she admired and grew to love, and as such she was educated and 'finished', the benefits of elocution, foreign language and singing lessons added to her natural graces, and in 1791 he married her, much to the chagrin no doubt of Charles Greville.

As Lady Hamilton Emma was literally the toast of Naples society. She was a favourite at the Neapolitan court of Kind Ferdinand IV and the close friend and confident of the Queen, Maria Carolina (sister of Marie Antoinette of France). In Naples she developed her Attitudes, a repetoire of tableaux vivant poses representing classical characters from Ancient Greek and
Roman history, that became famous and much admired in Europe by many, including writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe and composer Joseph Hadyn, other artists and academics and many of the members of parliament, of royal families and of aristocracies within Sir William's vast and varied ambassadorial and scientific circles.

Illustration:
Emma Hamilton as the Goddess of Health (Vestina)
circa 1786-90
Robert Cosway
The National Maritime Museum London

Although Emma was very beautiful, it was the way she could embody a character as an ideal and her eye for the visually artistic, the skills of a good model and a muse, that made her prized by many painters as a subject, including Vigée le Brun, Marie Antoinette's friend and principal portrait artist. The Neoclassicism of the Enlightenment and the European Republican admiration for Ancient Greece and Rome were the driving forces behind the radical change of dress in the Georgian period and the simple, classical, Grecian costumes of Lady Hamilton's Attitudes were hugely influential on the Directoire and Empire styles of women's dress in Europe and Britain. Lady Hamilton was certainly not clever, she could be very critical and she had a healthy appetite for admiration, and for wine but she was also good company, warm, loyal, an excellent wife to Sir William and a widely respected society hostess.

Emma first met Admiral Nelson briefly in August 1793 when his ship The Agamemnon docked in the Bay of Naples but it was not until he returned after five years of war in 1798 that their unique relationship was solidified. The bond between Sir William, Emma and Nelson was complicated and highly nuanced. A frail, injured and battle-weary Nelson was nursed back to health and joyfulness by an attentive Emma. First as his nursemaid, with the skills and patience she'd learned in her pre-courtesan career and then as his mistress, Emma nurtured and worshiped Nelson who was, at the same time, treated as a son and friend by Sir William. For the next 18 months, Nelson, who was childless but married to a wife in England, lived in a ménage-à-trois with the Hamiltons while his ships were moored in the bay of Naples.

In 1800 the Hamiltons and Nelson returned to England, where society was far less forgiving and where Nelson, his estranged wife and family were adored and Emma was despised and ridiculed in the press. Nelson did spend some time with Fanny, Lady Nelson at first but eventually gave her up entirely and, between naval engagements, he was most often a guest in Sir William's house in London and openly continued his affair with Emma. The affair was an outrageous scandal, sympathy and solidarity for the abandoned and blameless Lady Nelson was intense and Emma, though the wife of the highly respected Neapolitan ambassador, was denied presentation at court and duly shunned by good society. But she was believed to have become a friend of the Prince Regent, naturally. In 1801 while in the late stages of pregnancy, she still went abroad in London, defying the accepted practice of gentlewomen to not socialize at large once they had began to show, and to remain confined entirely to their homes in late pregnancy. She was consequently lampooned in the press as hugely obese and, despite her education, charm and grace, as vulgar and irredeemably working class.

Their daughter Horatia was born in 1801. Sir William, quite elderly by this time, died in London in 1803 and Nelson purchased a house for Emma at Merton but he himself was assigned to the HMS Victory and would not return to England for two years. Their second child Emma was born not long after his departure and died early of chicken pox. Upon his return , he and Emma lived happily for a few short months as husband and wife at Merton before he was recalled to the war. Horatio Nelson was killed in action at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. In his will, Nelson entrusted Emma's care to the nation, as his estate must fall to his brother, but this was ignored by George III and his government. With her working class roots, her questionable past and her penchant for self-display Emma Hamilton was an embarrassment. Struggling to keep up Merton as a monument to England's beloved Nelson, she swiftly burned through all she had within three years and after borrowing money she couldn't repay, she spent a year with Horatia in King's Bench debtor's prison, where the Prince Regent dined with her on occasion. She then left England permanently for France. Emma had always been a drinker and she died destitute of alcoholism ten years later in Calais in 1815. Emma Carew is believed to have died without issue, abroad or in Wales not long after her mother. Horatia Nelson was taken in by Nelson's mother's relations and later married the Reverend Phillip Ward at the age of 21. They were apparently very happy and had ten children together, eight of who survived to adulthood and whose descents still live in Norfolk.

I sometimes wonder if the very public and well publicized scandal of Emma and Nelson had an impact on the way Austen chose to portray the navy, sexual misconduct and sexual misconduct within in the navy in Mansfield Park.

Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton in a White Turban
1791
George Romney
The Hunting Library, San Marino, California

Philosophical Gothic

2007-08-13T00:47:00.000-07:00

Residents of Vancouver BC may be interested to know that in January 2008 the East Vancouver Cultural Centre will be housing the Catalyst Theatre's very well received production of Frankenstein.

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was published in 1818. The production is an original and faithful adaptation by Jonathan Christenson.

Photo by Photomagic featuring Tracey Penner

Books on Tape Techie Time: iTunesU Podcasts

2007-08-10T21:52:00.000-07:00

Life can be so sweet when you least expect it. It's not as if I was having a boring Friday night but certainly it was well behaved. While we here at Chez Old Grey Pony were relaxing on the sofa, eating spaghetti, listening to music and gleefully playing with our facebook pages, we couldn't help but wistfully think of our more cashed up acquaintances drinking wine and eating tapas on a restaurant patio somewhere late into the summer evening. But, ours is the fate of all who must pay off student loans and I cheerfully sat down to stroll through my iTunes podcast menu while the blueberry muffins we were baking were in the oven.

Little did I expect to come across The Greatest Podcast of All Time.

iTunesU features a brand new selection of free podcasts created and published by universities for their students and the Lit2Go (love the name) cast created by the University of South Florida is phenomenal and includes, among many others, a fantastic reading of Sense and Sensibility in the Group 9 collection and Northanger Abbey in the Group 12 collection. I don't know who the narrator is but his voice and his style of reading are excellent and it's very refreshing to listen to an Austen novel read by a male narrator for a change, and who is much more talented at reading than some of the actors narrating purchasable titles.

Lit2Go is very exciting and features many classics, too many to mention here but a quick look reveals several Georgian and Austen related works, including:

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Castles of Athlin and Dublayne by Ann Radcliffe

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

The Purple Jar by Maria Edgeworth

There are so many more and a quick special mention to the Brontë sisters, Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf, as well as poetry and traditional readings and also another collection En Espaň ol. Nice one, University of South Florida. If you do not have iTunes already, you may download it free of charge on the Apple website.

I'm going to have a good old browse through the rest of iTunesU and a blueberry muffin.

Belated Georgian Item of the Week

2007-08-09T00:34:00.000-07:00

Scientists: Joseph Priestley 1733 - 1804

Joseph Priestley
circa 1801
Rembrandt Peale
The Trout Gallery Dickinson College, PA

A native of West Yorkshire, Joseph Priestley was a natural philosopher, chemist, educator and Dissenting clergyman, and he is credited with the discovery of the existence of oxygen. A clergyman-chemist, Priestley called the gas he discovered, "dephlogisticated air." It was French physicist Antoine Lavoisier, a great admirer of Priestley’s, who named it oxygen. Priestley, a close friend of Benjamin Franklin, experimented with electricity before turning his attention to chemistry in the early 1770s. His other discoveries include hydrochloric acid, nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and sulfur dioxide, and he invented soda water.

Priestley’s contributions to education were as important as those to science. He was the first British educator to insist on the value of modern history as a subject and that a thorough understanding of history was necessary not only to worldly success but also to spiritual growth. Priestley was innovative in the teaching and description of English grammar, particularly his efforts to disassociate it from Latin grammar, and the founder of the first liberal arts curriculum. He communicated with Thomas Jefferson regarding the proper organization of a university and when Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, it was Priestley's curricular principles that dominated the school. No wonder it’s so awesome.

Priestley helped found the Unitarian church and was a supporter of the French Revolution, and due to his nonconformist views, in 1791 a mob destroyed his house and laboratory in Birmingham. This episode and subsequent troubles made him decide to emigrate to the United States, where he died in 1804 in Pennsylvania. His house on Priestley Avenue, Northumberland PA, with the first scientific laboratory in America, may still be visited

Accidents and Coincidence in Persuasion

2007-08-07T02:15:00.000-07:00

Anne Elliot and her two suitors Captain Wentworth and Mr Elliot, are traveling in a web of accidents and coincidences in Persuasion. This web puts them all in the same field, gives both suitors the advantage of luck and mystery, yet keeps them tangled away from Anne, struggling and gradually moving in their necessary directions, towards and away from her, as the novel progresses.

Wentworth is most strongly associated with luck and lucky accidents. At the time of his youthful engagement to Anne he had already 'been lucky in his profession’ and later Admiral Croft comments on his luck at having been assigned the Laconia by the navy, in which he had chanced to take enough privateers and war bounty to make him rich. Coinciding with his return from the war, his sister and brother-in-law the Crofts ‘accidentally hear’ of Kellynch Hall being to let while at Taunton, and thus the new tenants of Kellynch, Anne’s rightful home and the scene of her historic courtship, are the immediate family of her one time fiancé, and expecting Wentworth moreover to stay with them.

While Sir Walter and Elizabeth Elliot decamp to Bath, Anne embarks on a long visit to her married sister Mary in the adjoining neighbourhood of Uppercross and, given the sociable habits of the Uppercross family, the Musgroves, she is understandably uneasy at the prospect of socializing with a man whom she had been persuaded to break off an engagement with eight years earlier, who has improved with time while she has faded, and with whom she is still in love. But a Persuasion accident allows her to absent herself from the dinner party she was to first meet him again at, when her nephew suffers a bad fall from a tree. In order that the child’s parents may attend the dinner, she offers to stay at home and nurse the him, preventing a long, painful and public reunion for them both. A coincidence is discovered by Mrs Musgrove when she suddenly remembers that Wentworth was the one of the captains their son Richard had served under in the navy. Never much loved on land but having died at sea, the troublesome Dick’s association with Wentworth, who had encouraged him to write the only two letters that weren’t supplications for money that his parents ever received, gives a touchingly pathetic and grateful tinge to the already healthy Uppercross admiration for the captain. And at Uppercross, accidents and coincidences first seem to pull Wentworth towards Louisa Musgrove.

The occurrence of accidents is a dominant motif throughout the narrative and never more so than on the day of the young people’s long walk to Winthrop, does this motif tie Anne, Louisa and Wentworth together. Whilst Anne is mediating on poetry that depicts the sweets of autumn, Wentworth tells of the Crofts’ adventures in their gig:

“…I wonder whereabouts they will upset to-day. Oh! it does happen very often, I assure you; but my sister makes nothing of it; she would as lieve be tossed out as not."

"Ah! You make the most of it, I know," cried Louisa, "but if it were really so, I should do just the same in her place. If I loved a man, as she loves the Admiral, I would always be with him, nothing should ever separate us, and I would rather be overturned by him, than driven safely by anybody else."

It was spoken with enthusiasm.

"Had you?" cried he, catching the same tone; "I honour you!"

Anne’s thoughts ‘could not immediately fall into a quotation again’ after this exchange, understandably.

Later on the Winthrop walk she accidentally overhears a conversation between Wentworth and Louisa. Having sat down to rest, ‘she very soon heard Captain Wentworth and Louisa in the hedge-row, behind her’, an accident which has two-fold significance. In one way, the exchange between Louisa and Wentworth draws him superficially closer to Louisa as he admires her strength of resolution in comparison to Henrietta Musgrove’s wavering about Charles Hayter, and by unmentioned proxy, Anne’s youthful wavering about him. But she also overhears Louisa tell him how she had refused her brother Charles' proposal a few years earlier too. Louisa wrongly speculates that Lady Russell persuaded her to refuse Charles Musgrove, leading Anne to assume Wentworth will now believe her to be completely without judgment for herself. And yet, ‘there had been just that degree of feeling and curiosity about her in his manner’ to pose the idea that he now begins to hope she might still be in love with him.

On the close of the Winthrop walk, the party comes across the accident prone Crofts in their gig and Wentworth, having noticed Anne’s fatigue, orchestrates a lift for her with them and Anne is driven home by the couple who unknowingly almost had become, and later would become her in-laws. And though on the drive they speculate on a romance at Uppercross for Wentworth, due to Mrs Croft’s precision, any other accidents here were avoided:

…by coolly giving the reins a better direction herself they happily passed the danger; and by once afterwards judiciously putting out her hand they neither fell into a rut, nor ran foul of a dung-cart.

To be continued

Misreading

2007-08-02T22:27:00.000-07:00

I'd be interested to learn others' feelings on reading Emma.

Among novelists who have written more than one or two books, for me it is happens most often that I will like only one or two of a particular writer's works, and it is very rare that something about the writer's style or subject matter will make me very keen, obsessed even at times, to read all of their books, usually as soon as possible. This occurred most strongly for me with Jean Rhys, George Eliot, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, (indeed, this was very nearly a Hardy blog) Fyodor Dostoevsky and of course, Jane Austen. With one notable exception.

I read Emma first when I was about seventeen and at the time probably simply thought as it as my least favourite Austen book, shelved it for three or four years and never thought about it.

In a fit of boredom I re-read it again years later, that time with more respect for the character writing but still with no great attachment to it and I remember calling Emma something along the lines of a self important airhead as I finished the book. I read it too in my Eng Lit class days and though my appreciation for the story grew and my dislike of the central character dwindled it was still the least interesting work in my book, and I didn't enter into the stance held by scholars who articles I read in lit journals, that it was Austen's most complex work. At the time I thought it as light, relatively enjoyable but not significant reading.

Today, in the middle of reading Emma for the fourth time, I wonder how I could have been so blind. I'm astounded really that I never picked up on the depth of Emma before. Perhaps that it takes place in a inward looking, confined area squashed in with characters whom I could never like. Mr Knightley and Jane Fairfax are the most interesting and the reader's time with them is so limited, necessarily. I really can't put it down on this reading and am amazed that I disliked it so much before. I think perhaps it takes maturity to not misread Emma.

I'll be writing more about Emma once I've finished and I'm interested in your perceptions of the novel...

Georgian Item of the Week

2007-07-31T04:30:00.000-07:00

The Abolition: Olaudah Equiano

Portrait of Olaudah Equiano
Circa 1780
Previously attributed to Joshua Reynolds
Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter

Although forms of bondage had existed in West and Central Africa (and indeed in Europe) before the trans-Atlantic slave trade, human beings were rarely the main commodity at the African marketplace. In the modern world however, the enslaved African was inspected, assessed, auctioned, bought, sold and bartered by Europeans and treated in any manner his owner saw fit.

In 1788 an autobiographical work, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was published in England, and which set the precedent for anti-slavery literature written by former slaves themselves, which would have a profound impact on the abolition movements in the eighteenth century. Equiano was born in what is modern day Nigeria and kidnapped by slave traders at the age of 11. He was owned by several masters, educated, adopted into Methodism and as he was allowed by his last owner to conduct business for himself, he eventually bought his freedom.

Among the tradition of slave narratives, Equiano's is considered a remarkable achievement since the autobiographical style was not a well-developed genre in the eighteenth century. His narrative has vivid details and is written in the picaresque style. Equiano provides a detailed account of his kidnapping, the unfathomable crossing of the Atlantic in the belly of a slave ship and the brutality, the bondage and the life he endured as a slave.

Impropriety by the Seaside. Part Three - Conclusion.

2007-07-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

Parts One and Two Here
Weymouth

“Very lucky--marrying as they did, upon an acquaintance formed only in a public place!--They only knew each other, I think, a few weeks in Bath! Peculiarly lucky!-- for as to any real knowledge of a person's disposition that Bath, or any public place, can give--it is all nothing; there can be no knowledge.”

What is Frank Churchill doing in Emma when he makes this statement at the Box Hill Picnic? Ridiculing the Eltons, whom this speech was about, and expressing his disdain for them? Carrying on the campaign of deceit in Highbury to hide his secret engagement with Jane Fairfax, which had also been formed on a few weeks' acquaintance in a public watering place, Weymouth, and having a private, ironic joke about it? Trifling with the affections of Jane Fairfax by insinuating that he might have tired of their engagement? He is doing all of these simultaneously and moreover, giving voice to an opinion generally held at the time about acquaintances formed in public, and especially watering, places.

Mr Knightley holds this opinion himself and expresses it in his succinct history of their engagement:

“He meets with a young woman at a watering-place, gains her affection, cannot even weary her by negligent treatment--and had he and all his family sought round the world for a perfect wife for him, they could not have found her superior.”

The point being of course that at watering places such as Bath and Weymouth, unscrupulous men were far more likely to be snared by Isabella Thorpes and Lydia Bennets than be fortunate enough to gain the heart and hand of an incomparably superior Jane Fairfax. Interestingly, its Frank Churchill's impropriety that is more closely associated with seaside Weymouth than Jane Fairfax's. Even before he enters the storyline himself, he is depicted by Knightley as at his leisure in 'the idlest haunts in the kingdom' and 'forever at some watering-place or other' when it was his duty instead to visit his newly wedded father and stepmother in Highbury, though he had claimed to not be at liberty to do so. It is Weymouth furthermore that Emma envisions as the setting for feelings she imagines Jane Fairfax to have for Mr Dixon, a fantasy Frank Churchill encourages her in, pretending to speculate about illicit feelings between his own fiancé and Mr Dixon, a married man; an unfeeling ruse designed to turn any suspicious eyes away from himself.

It was unseemly undoubtedly of Jane Fairfax to agree to an engagement, and a clandestine one at that, with a man who's guardians it's known as a certainty will object to her poverty despite her excellent character and real attachment to their kinsman. The treatment she receives from Frank Churchill and Emma however, the irksomeness of Mrs Elton's attentions and the tediousness of Miss Bates', and the very uncomfortable notion that such a woman as Jane Fairfax should have to waste her life as a governess, more than makes up for losing her head by the seaside, no? On the topic of Mrs Elton, Austen gives her two portions of association, and rightly so. She hails from Bristol, and is courted in Bath.

Austen visited the seaside many times, and at many different spots, during her life. Impropriety by the seaside was on it's way to theming itself into an entire novel but Austen's last illness and her sad early death left her novel of a seaside town, entitled Sanditon unfinished

The Sanditon fragment may be read here at the University of Virginia Library website.

Conclusion

Georgian Item of the Week

2007-07-24T07:28:00.000-07:00

Between the years 1729 and 1737 Henry Fielding wrote 25 plays, including his most well known, Tom Thumb but he acclaimed critical notice with his novels. The best known are The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), a picaresque novel in which the tangled comedies of coincidence are offset by the neat, architectonic structure of the story, and The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), a parody of Richardson's Pamela (1740). In 1734, he married Charlotte Cradock, who became his model for Sophia Western in Tom Jones and for the heroine of Amelia, the author's last novel.

In 1747, several years after Charlotte Fielding’s death, he caused some scandal by marrying his wife's maid and friend Mary Daniel - he was condemned by every snob in England. She was about to bear his child, and Fielding would not abandon her to disgrace.

Fielding's writings became more socially orientated – among other things, he opposed public hangings. After having studied the law throughout his life, he was appointed to the bar in 1740 and he was made justice of the peace for the City of Westminster in 1748 and for the county of Middlesex in 1749. He fought constantly against corruption and with his brother he set up the Bow Street Runners, a detective force that later turned into Scotland Yard. Fielding was a pioneer of the novel as an art form and Tom Jones has been the most admired of them all by many writers who followed him, including Jane Austen

Becoming Marketable

2007-07-24T07:19:00.000-07:00

Biopics that meddle with historical figures and bend the facts to promote their agenda drive me crazy. At the same time, I love a good historical film. I am not immune to enjoying historical inaccuracy. A movie like Amadeus for example puts a person like me in a bit of a jam. On one hand, it’s a phenomenal production in every sense. On the other, it’s a total fabrication and thanks to it, Salieri will probably always be thought of by every body who takes biopics to be factual, as the murderer of Mozart. Which is really unfair if you happen to be Salieri; and which leads me again and unequivocally for the last time, to Becoming Jane. God, that title is so syrupy it makes me queasy.

It is true that Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy had a short but animated flirtation, that they were very much attracted to one another, and that Lefroy disappointed her. A very brief non-mention of him in one of her letters three years after their acquaintance ceased shows that she had cared for him but there is nothing to suggest a grand love. (I’m pretty sure ‘non-mention’ isn’t passable as a word but I think it describes Austen's allusional style of letter writing better than, well, allusion. Caveat: allusional is also not a word kids.) In his old age Lefroy told his nephew that he’d had ‘a boyish love’ for ‘the writer Jane Austen’ but I can’t help but wonder that if she had not become famous by the time this remark was made, would he have even remembered the short flirtation of their long distant youth?

I call it shabby indeed to build these few scratchings of a month long flirtation into a love affair and declare that it was a talented writer’s greatest influence. Austen’s influences were clearly drawn from the world around her, for her books are full of lives, the way of people and the way of the world, not just courtships. Those lives are diverse too and not often romantic: glimpses into the never ending workload of servants, the grubby port dwelling Prices, Harriet Smith and Eliza Williams of dubious and undesirable birth, Eliza Barton in a spunging-house¹, Mrs Smith in poverty and crippled, Dick Musgrove, a troublesome half-wit son, the grasping, offensive, stupid John Thorpe and a long list of gamblers, seducers and idiots. Her works feature sailors and soldiers at war, allusions to political unrest, ambition of every nature and moral ambiguity. If love isn’t the sole feature of her books, how can it reasonably be called her sole influence?

If an ado really had to be made about her love life, which I cannot consider as necessary or desirable, Austen was disappointed likewise by a Mr Holder of Ashe House as well as Tom Lefroy. Austen had evidentially expected a proposal from Holder, had even written of her disappointment to her sister, of their being ten minutes alone together in the same room and yet her not receiving any declaration. Austen appears to have had at least three serious suitors, two of whom she received definite proposals from, and denied, but it has been, more realistically in my opinion, speculated that if Austen ever had strong feelings for anyone, it was for the third, and a very shadowy personage, the Nameless Clergyman. In the summer of 1801 the Austens holidayed in Devonshire and formed a friendship with two brothers; a physician and a clergyman. Austen and the clergyman fell in love, apparently to the happiness and approval of all parties. The brothers intended to visit the Austens soon after the holiday was over, and the two factions even planned out a trip together for the following year. To quote from John Halperin²:

It was fully expected by the Austen family that at the first opportunity the clergyman would offer marriage, and that Jane would accept….Instead of an early reunion with her would-be fiancé Jane Austen, according to Cassandra³, received soon after from his brother notice of his death

Anybody who has become friendly with someone while on holiday, promised to keep in touch, and then never contacted them again, will know that such friendships do spring up and fizzle out in life, and that sometimes, rather than inflict hurt, a person will lie to get out of an acquaintance or obligation. But the possibility of lying about a brother’s death however, even to get out of a reconsidered and cooled attachment, seems too extreme to be probable. But it is possible and we can’t reject the possibility of this notice being untrue. Some of Austen’s letters from this time, like so many others, were censored and cut up by Cassandra Austen after her sister’s death and no further mention of the clergyman, his brother or their name can be found.

This censorship took place to preserve Austen’s reputation, or image rather, as a contented, dutiful and sedate woman. This white-washed image was gobbled up whole by a society nursing a conservative backlash that would soon fully unleash itself during the reign of Victoria, and distort every Austen biography or memoir for decades to follow. But it’s this very censorship, that Cassandra did not practice in the case of Lefroy or Holder or other suitors, that suggests that here there were real feelings and existing delicacies to be hurt by exposure to the public. What it comes down to is speculation nonetheless, and a little too much to call something biographic.

If a filmmaker were bent on producing an Austen love biopic, this tender history of a dead lover would seem far more likely material or at least be enough to discredit the notion of one young and immature man straight of college having an influence over the work of Austen for the rest of her life. Lefroy, I don’t doubt was focused on because, as he later became the Chief Justice of Ireland, there was plenty of information about his life to flesh him out and he happened to utter that claim to immortal association, of having had a ‘boyish love’ for her. The question of why a studio would make such a film can have at least two answers, and probably more. A feminist take would suggest that our society can’t handle the thought of a bold, intelligent woman becoming one of the greatest authors in the canon of English literature simply because she was brilliant, and must attribute the greatness of her works to the influence of men. A similarly cynical answer may be the most obvious: that thanks to the popularity of the screen adaptations of Austen’s novels, a love biopic about the writer herself, along with the bonus of permitting a usage of the carriages and corsets draw card, ever popular with the free spending female audience, is going to bring in buckets of cash, whether accurate or not.

¹A place of temporary confinement for debtors, kept by a bailiff, where debtors were sponged of all money they had on themselves, before being transferred to debtor's prison (Wikionary)

² Jane Austen's Lovers by John Halperin in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 25, No. 4, Nineteenth Century. (Autumn, 1985), pp. 719-736

³ Cassandra Austen, Jane Austen’s sister and chief correspondent.

Impropriety by the Seaside. Part Two.

2007-07-22T23:24:00.000-07:00

Lyme
Although there is indecorousness at Uppercross, foolishness at Kellynch and snobbishness in Bath, the improprieties practiced by all almost every character in the first half of Persuasion are capped by the dangerous and interesting events of the novel taking place by the seaside, at Lyme. The careless intimacy between Captain Wentworth and Louisa Musgrove proceeds rapidly at Uppercross and in her child-like admiration of him ‘he had had to jump her from the stiles’ in all of their country walks. In fervor for the navy and by proxy, the sea, the Miss Musgroves fuel a trip for the Uppercross young people to Lyme, where Wentworth’s closest friends, the Harvilles and Captain Benwick, are quartered. On a walk on the Cobb there are some perilous stairs to be got down and as ‘the sensation was delightful to her’; Louisa is jumped down them by Captain Wentworth. Undoubtedly the sensation of being held in the captain’s hands was more delightful than jumping from heights. Headstrong and infatuated, Louisa insists on jumping again, from higher and with too little notice, and she falls unconscious and concussed onto the pavement. Louisa’s headstrong actions leave her barely conscious for weeks at Lyme and though she recovers, her near fatal fall alters her temperament, her former boisterousness gone and a quiet, nervous, sober girl emerges from the drama.

On the same trip to Lyme Anne Elliot twice briefly encounters a gentleman the party later learns to be Mr Elliot, the heir to Kellynch Hall and Anne’s cousin. His failure to properly attend the Elliot family, his marriage to a low woman and his disparaging remarks about Sir Walter and Miss Elizabeth Elliot had caused a breech between the baronet and his heir. Though reconciled for a short period with the Elliots in Bath , his past life proves to be a true representation of his character, as it transpires that he has seduced Mrs Clay to get her away from Sir Walter, in order that he may prevent the baronet from marrying her and producing a son, thereby disinheriting him. With Mrs Smith’s enlightening story, the reader learns that he contributed to the financial ruin of her deceased husband and refuses, though Smith thought him a great friend, to act on her behalf that she may lift herself out of her present poverty. He is linked also with another seaside place, as it was told in Lyme that he had been in Sidmouth previous to his introduction into the narrative.

To be continued

Impropriety by the Seaside. Part One.

2007-07-19T14:40:00.000-07:00

Modern day readers of Jane Austen may well be baffled by the scandalous reputation of seaside resorts in Georgian Britain. The word 'resorts' refers not to those mega complex hotel monstrosities that can currently be seen ruining the landscape of exotic locales the world over but simply a destination that is an attraction in itself, such as the seaside, and which also provides a society of sorts for visitors. 'Watering place' was likewise a term applied to seaside places and also encompassed Bath.

There was without doubt a loosening of propriety within the society of watering places. These towns were public places, while the social activities of London houses and country estates were much more controlled and private in the main. In the country a person was in their private home, in London they were working the season, elsewhere they were on holiday. Acquaintances were made that would never have been made in the stricter regimes of London or the country, familiarities might be allowed and liberties may be taken that similarly could never have been anywhere else. If this seems surprising within the context of Georgian society, well, just think what people will do on holiday these days that they would never do at home. It's the same mindset.

Bath was a respectable, wealthy town famous for it's drinking water and healing baths and popular amongst the holidaying classes who were in need of restoration, or did not like or could not afford London for a couple of months. It's being cheaper and cheerier made Bath an ideal spot for fortune-hunters such as the Thorpe siblings of Northanger Abbey and the scene of Eliza Williams' acquaintance with Willoughby in Sense & Sensibility, who could live at less expense and worm their way more easily into hearts of genteel folk in the more relaxed society of Bath, than they could in London.

The chief attraction of Bath was the benefits the place had to one's health, and to ne're-do-wells no doubt the chief attraction was the bored wives, daughters and nieces of gouty gentleman more occupied with their own ailments than the pleasures of their womenfolk. But at the seaside there were even greater health benefits to be had in sea bathing and (oh god) drinking sea water, and most likely ladies who were even more unoccupied, since there were considerably fewer town things by the seaside to take up their time and interest. And there was sea bathing, and all the sensations and delight such an activity could stir up compared to the otherwise sedate experiences of a Georgian lady. It's no accident that so many improprieties occur at seaside resorts in Austen's novels.

Ramsgate
Tom Bertram's gallivanting in Mansfield Park sees him idling in as many as three seaside places (as well as London and country houses) within the short time frame of the narrative. He races horses at Brighton, he makes the acquaintance of the fashionable and rather weak-headed Yates at Weymouth, who later persuades Julia Bertram to elope with him, and in telling a story of a visit to Ramsgate he gives a description of the kind of impropriety tolerated in watering places. He forms a new acquaintance on the pier, an inappropriate beginning in itself. Mrs Sneyd is 'surrounded by men' and the two Miss Sneyds are left to the company of other strange young men. Moreover, it transpires that the youngest Miss Sneyd, though 'perfectly easy in her manners, and as ready to talk as to listen' and not demurely attired, is not even 'out' in society. An unseemly piece of mismanagement, as 'Miss Augusta should have a been with her governess'. In other words, she was but a child being made available for the pleasures of men, not unlike Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Georgiana Darcy, Lydia's predecessor in the schemes of Wickham, was taken to Ramsgate by his co-conspirator Mrs Younge, in order that he may gain access to her while she is unchaperoned, unwatched and without guidance, and be persuaded to elope with him. Ramsgate is a natural choice here, the quieter, more isolated town means fewer eyes on such a wealthy and young lady. Wickham of course fails at Ramsgate with Georgiana due to the lucky arrival of Darcy. Later however, to really seal the deal of Lydia's seduction, Wickham has as an advantage the largeness and the careless, mindless, raffish, rakish society of Georgian party central: Brighton.

Brighton
Wickham wasn't the only one sexing it up at Brighton, for the town was the darling of the most oversexed personage of the era, Prince George. Throughout the prince's patronage, especially during the Regency, Brighton was the most decadent, amoral real society in the land. I say 'real society' because the demi-monde, the world of courtesans and mistresses, was a thriving one but not 'society' as such. Soldiers, sailors, courtiers, nobleman, fortune-seekers, pleasure-seekers, money, fashion, familiarity, balmy summer eves and the invigoratingly fresh and salty air...Brighton was a dangerous place. As Austen well knew, for it becomes the scene of Lydia Bennet's licentious flirtations with many an officer in Pride and Prejudice, of Wickham's hedonism and of their elopement together. An elopement even that does not pass honorably with a chaste wedding in Scotland but ends in seduction, and then concealment in London. Brighton, in Mansfield Park comes after the wedding rather than before it. The Rushworths honeymoon in the town with Julia Bertram in tow, an odd place and an odd arrangement unless you consider than the new Mrs Rushworth is likely to want to spend a little time with her tiresome husband as possible. When Sir Thomas sardonically states that his daughters 'have their pleasures at Brighton' he alludes to such pleasures as would not be tolerated at Mansfield.

To be continued...

Georgian Item of the Week

2007-07-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

Young Woman Ironing
circa 1800
Louis-Léopold Boilly
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

This painting has got me thinking and I believe I'll research a post on servants in Georgian Britain and Austen's novels. Check in for that over the next few days. Due to a faulty (and scarily sparky) power cord, my computer and I had parted ways for a while but we're back to posting more often from now on.

Austen and the Picturesque. Part Four Concluded.

2007-07-13T02:28:00.000-07:00

For the beginning of Part Four please see below.

“I like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles. I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined, tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles or thistles, or heath blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a watch-tower,- and a troop of tidy, happy villages please me better than the finest banditti in the world.”

- Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility

Marianne’s appreciation of the Picturesque isn’t merely an exercise in fashionable sentimentality. Although her demonstrativeness is revealed to be affected, Marianne’s feelings are genuine; her real sensibilities as well as her sense prevail in the novel. While Austen uses the Picturesque to highlight Marianne’s emotionalism, she also uses it to remind us of her real taste and intelligence underneath her often self-absorbed and foolish actions. Edward and Marianne hold intelligent discussions about landscape and the narrative hints at ‘old disputes’ between them, indicating a history of thoughtful debate. The jargons of the Picturesque are not merely hollow words when used by Marianne:

"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all the delight in a fine prospect which you profess to feel…”

Marianne’s actions of course and even her language at times borders on the absurd, and Austen associates the Picturesque with the absolutely absurd Rushworth in Mansfield Park. In a rage for ‘improvements’ Rushworth bores the Mansfield company with talk of instigating some at Sotherton. "Your best friend upon such an occasion," Maria Bertram advices succinctly "would be Mr. Repton, I imagine", an especially absurd plan, for Repton designed landscapes very well, but never physically built them, not being a gardener himself. Though he charged ‘five guineas a day’, his designs were often not followed since a gardener would have to then be brought in to implement them.

Throughout her works Austen never criticizes the Picturesque per se but she does criticize the fashion for it. Like the subject of any fashion, there is nothing wrong with the Picturesque, what Austen ridicules with it, as she does so often, is the blind following of a trend without reason, honesty, learning or a consultation of real personal taste.

Conclusion.

For Parts 1 - 3 please see the Austen and the Picturesque tag.

Austen and The Picturesque. Part Four.

2007-07-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

In Sense and Sensibility Marianne Dashwood’s ‘passion for dead leaves’ is more than a romantic appreciation of Picturesque nature, it’s a declaration of the ideals that she has adopted. Decaying beauty is a phrase that could be used to describe Marianne herself for a good portion of the narrative, as well indicate her tastes. Her character is sound; she is ‘sensible and clever…generous, amiable, interesting’ but her demonstrative emotions and her actions are fueled by Romanticism, and often conjure affectations that, she acknowledges in the final chapters, go against even her character. Her sensibilities are fed by ill judged but popular sentimental notions and propped up by her will to embody the Romanticism of the poetry she reads and the decaying beauty of the Picturesque she so admires. These sensibilities, likewise the Picturesque, invoke drama.

When Elinor pokes fun at Marianne’s first conversation with Willoughby she jokes that ‘another meeting will suffice to explain his sentiments on picturesque beauty, and second marriages, and then you can have nothing farther to ask.’ Marianne’s notions on landscapes and love characteristically have the Romantic in common. Edward Ferrars also teases her good naturedly on the topic. During his first stay at Barton Cottage he admires the surrounding countryside and ridicules the language of the Picturesque as a superficial concern:

"You must not enquire too far, Marianne; remember I have no knowledge in the picturesque, and I shall offend you by my ignorance and want of taste if we come to particulars. I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged; and distant objects out of sight, which ought only to be indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmosphere.”

Marianne laments that ‘every body pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was’, ‘him’ being William Gilpin in his series of essays on the Picturesque, a devotion to whom Edward also notes when he declares that is she were rich, Marianne ‘would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree’ and indeed, on the sister’s journey to London, ‘any object of picturesque beauty within their view drew from her an exclamation of delight’

Part Four is to be continued

Books on Tape Techie Time: Podcasts

2007-07-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

There are a small handful of Jane Austen related podcasts presently available through iTunes. Among the Austen podcasts however I can only honestly recommend one, but I do so warmly and whole heartedly.

The majority of the present Austen podcast selection is rather mediocre but in the Higher Education category of podcasts there is a unabridged recording of Pride and Prejudice read by Catherine Byers. There is no listing of who the book is read by in iTunes, so I didn't know the name of the narrator until I downloaded and started to listed to it. I wasn't familiar with Catherine Byers so I looked her up and it turns out that she is an actress well known for narration, has recorded more than 500 works over 26 years and was honored with an award for her work in narration. Her reading of Pride and Prejudice is superb. She has an excellent voice and is an expressive and talented narrator. This reading is better than many purchasable titles and it's available free of charge in the podcast section of your iTunes online store. If you do not have iTunes already, you may download it free of charge on the Apple website.

Georgian Item of the Week

2007-07-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

Georgian Item of the Week Presents:

The Big Three of the Napoleonic Wars: Well, Nel and Nap. Part Three.

Napoleon I of France
15 August 1769 - 5 May 1821

Napoleon Bonaparte First Consul
1802
Antoine-Jean Gros
Musée Nationale de la Légion d’Honneur, Paris

Napoleon Bonaparte was born to a minor Corsican noble family – the Buonapartes - in 1769, not long after the island became the property of France. Following a childhood spent in military academies, Napoleon distinguished himself in the army of revolutionary France, particularly during the campaigns of 1796. Napoleon was a master politician and despite British military defeat in Egypt in 1798, by February 1800 he was established as the First Consul of France. In 1804 he crowned himself Emperor of France and set out to conquer Europe.

Despite devastating naval defeat again by the British at Trafalgar (1805), for the next eight years Napoleon dominated Europe, fighting and defeating a range of alliances involving combinations of Austria, Britain, Russia and Prussia. Napoleon’s power began to mislead him however and in 1812 he made a tragically ill judged attempt to invade Russia. The majority of a 400 000 man army was lost in Russia, Britain had fought its way to France through Spain and in 1814 Paris surrendered to allied forces and Napoleon was sent into exile on the Island of Elba.

Napoleon had one final adventure in 1815. In less than one hundred days he had secretly returned to France, attracted vast support and reclaimed his Imperial throne, had re-emerged on the European scene with his army, and was finally defeated by the Duke of Wellington and General Blücher at Waterloo, and was then exiled even further from Europe. Napoleon Bonaparte spent the six final years of his life on the rocky island of St Helena, and despite modern theories citing a poisoning death, Napoleon died of stomach cancer in 1821. He was a masterful soldier, a highly skilled tactician and a superb administrator, and one of the most celebrated, and debated, personages in history.

A New Sensibility

2007-07-07T15:51:00.000-07:00

More than anything else about the PBS Jane Austen season in 2008, I'm most keen to see Andrew Davies' new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Davies of course is the man behind the best Emma and Pride and Prejudice adaptations (1995), as well as Middlemarch (1994), Take a Girl Like You (2000) and Bleak House (2003), among many other excellent productions. I'm also rather excited about his adaptation of A Room with a View, set to be released in the UK some time this year. The Merchant-Ivory production is one of my favourite films, probably in the top five, but I'm always interested in new and potentially good work.

There's been some silly talk in the media about Sense 08 rolling in a replacement for the (apparently) much talked of 'wet shirt scene' from Davies' Pride and Prej. Sigh. That's all I can do when read such dribble. My closest friend and I loved that production when we were teenagers. We watched it many times over, we probably knew the entire script by heart. My mum bought me 'the making of' book for my birthday. I was into it. But never once, not even as a sixteen year old, did I rewind and replay said scene or even think about it after it had passed. I never met anyone who gushed over it. I suspect it was obsessed over more in the media and in other books than in real life. There is of course a book in which it, and poor Colin Firth, actually play a part in the storyline, but so much do I dislike the BJ books that I can't even bring myself to type the words.

But I digress. Scenes involving dueling, seduction, rainy wood chopping and (apparently manly) horse riding are being speculated as there to up the sex appeal. I just find this kind of lurid speculation so boring. Davies knows what he's doing, he's at the top of his game, and gossip about shirtless men just takes away from the amount of research and work that goes into these productions, for the sake of a few sexy minutes.

Not that wood chopping and dueling aren't sexy. They totally are.

I'm very, very glad that the duel between Willoughby and Brandon, and the seduction of Eliza Williams feature, as she especially is such a crucial part of the book's storyline. Plus I just love a cinematic fencing duel. I can't help it. The Princess Bride and Dangerous Liaisons. I'm all about it.*

"The novel is as much about sex and money as social conventions. This drama is more overtly sexual than most previous Austen adaptations seen on screen and gets to grips with the dark underbelly of the book", states Davies in a BBC press release, and I think that says it all, really. I'm rather excited about this production and I believe it may well turn out to be a classic of BBC adaptations. The cast includes David Morrisey as Brandon, Dominic Cooper as Willoughby and newcomers Hattie Morahan as Elinor and Charity Wakefield as Marianne.

*It's just occurred to me at this later stage that this is most likely a duel with pistols. How daft that I just assumed it would be fencing.

Austen and The Picturesque. Part Three.

2007-07-04T12:17:00.001-07:00

The Picturesque and the Gothic are intertwined in Northanger Abbey, and the limits to which these notions are stretched is a motif sustained throughout the narrative. Austen offers up the Picturesque as a testament to the real feelings of the younger Tilneys, as opposed to the false ones voiced by General and Captain Tilney and the Thorpes. The direction the story takes is dependent on the actions of the Northanger sibling sets: the Morlands, the Thorpes and the Tilneys, the motives and actions of brothers and sisters are central to the narrative. The different ways in which the Picturesque is associated with the Thorpes and the Tilneys emphasizes the great differences in character and sincerity in the opposing siblings. Similar to how their response to Gothic novels delineates a marked difference between Eleanor Tilney and Isabella Thorpe; Eleanor reads a novel like The Mysteries of Udolpho as enjoyable fiction while Isabella seeks to emulate it’s flighty melodrama, so too does the different ways in which Henry Tilney and John Thorpe are linked with the Picturesque present the disparity in intelligence and naturalness between the two men.

This disparity is keenly demonstrated in the two separate excursions Catharine Moreland is taken on by the different siblings, on the inappropriate jaunt in the carriages with the Thorpes, and the more decorous, and more fulfilling, country walk with the Tilneys. John Thorpe, when trying to persuade her to give up this prearranged walk with the Tilneys in favour of the carriage outing with himself, her brother James and Isabella, plays on Catharine’s gothic leanings by proposing to lead the party as far away as Blaise Castle:

"Blaize Castle!" cried Catherine. "What is that'?"

"The finest place in England--worth going fifty
miles at any time to see."

"What, is it really a castle, an old castle?"

"The oldest in the kingdom."

"But is it like what one reads of?"

"Exactly--the very same."

"But now really--are there towers and long galleries?"

"By dozens."

As Austen well knew, Blaise Castle is a fake, not unlike John Thorpe. Modern built in 1766 on the Blaise estate, the 'castle' is not a real castle but a miniature one, and is in fact a garden feature typical of some of the artificial excesses in landscaping practiced under the banner of the Picturesque. Still standing today on the top of Blaise Hill on the estate in Bristol, the castle was only thirty years old when Northanger Abbey was written. The narrative isn’t only making Thorpe appear rather foolish to 18th century audiences, it associates him with the more ridiculous aspects of Picturesque fashion. Ironically, this sort of garden feature was actually known as a ‘folly’.

In opposition to John Thorpe’s folly, the truly warm, good hearted dispositions of Henry and Eleanor Tilney make a calm inclination towards the Picturesque very natural, essential even, to differentiate them from every other protagonist, and make them the emotional and imaginative equals, or superiors, of Catharine. There are none but the Tilneys who share Catharine’s romanticism. The Moreland parents and James, while excellent, are people of ‘useful plain sense’, ‘good temper’ and ‘very respectable’. Mr Allen, like the Morelands, is sensible, wise and unimaginative. Kindly Mrs Allen only has the latter in common with her husband but her good nature is an unemotional, soothing balm. But the Tilney’s romantic awareness is en par with Catharine's, and it is contrasted most strongly with the utterly unfeeling characters of the piece: the heartless and deceitful Thorpe siblings, and those stone cold Montoni* villains, General and Captain Tilney.

On their country walk, Austen tempers Henry Tilney’s interest in the Picturesque to an appreciation of natural beauty, that different way of seeing beauty in the natural landscape that was the original, more educational aspect of the notion:

They were viewing the country with the eyes of persons
accustomed to drawing, and decided on its capability of
being formed into pictures, with all the eagerness of real
taste

On Catherine expressing her ignorance and a desire to learn to draw, ‘a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed’. This ‘lecture’ isn’t an ecclesiastic enthuse for the contrite but a real exercise in teaching and learning:

He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second
distances--side-screens and perspectives--lights and
shades

Though intelligent and reasonable, Henry must not be immune to the emotional pull of the Picturesque, and Austen undercuts his sense with a little sensibility, by allotting to him the poetic romance of ‘a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak’.

The way the two men are differently associated with the Picturesque yields an accurate portraits of their characters – one clever with the capability for feeling, even romanticism, the other unfeeling, devoid of taste, and foolish. Austen offers a parting shot at the shallow end of the Picturesque, on the point of the General’s dry tour of the gardens at Northanger Abbey. Henry Tilney is absent and without him there to instruct her, Catharine is aware she ‘should not know what was picturesque when she saw it’. This little piece of self awareness coyly suggests that enthusiasm without education may lead to, among other misfortunes, the building of tacky fake castles in your garden.

*Montoni is Radcliffe’s villain in The Mysteries of Udolpho

To be continued

Nice one, Becs.

2007-07-03T15:04:00.000-07:00

My heartfelt thanks go out to my bonny lass Rebecca Steuart for assisting me in gaining access to an indispensable collection of journal and review articles.

Here's to you Sunflower.

Georgian Item of the Week

2007-07-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

Georgian Item of the Week Presents:

The Big Three of The Napoleonic Wars: Well, Nel and Nap. Part Two.

Vice-Admiral Horatio, Lord Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson
29 September 1758 - 21st October 1805

Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson
1800
Lemuel Francis Abbot
National Maritime Museum, UK

If Wellington is regarded as Britain’s greatest soldier, another Georgian must be considered their greatest sailor. Horatio Nelson won three of the most decisive naval battles in British history at the Nile (1798), Copenhagen (1801) and of course, Trafalgar, where in 1805 Nelson took his famous and essential victory over the navy of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Born in Norfolk, his father was the Rev. Edmund Nelson and his uncle the Admiral Suckling*. Nelson likewise joined the navy at the age of 12 and by his own merit as well as his Uncle’s interest, was promoted through the ranks to Captain by the age of 21. In 1798, Nelson was responsible for a great victory in a battle with the French navy. The Battle of the Nile (also known as the Battle of Abukir Bay) took place on August 1, 1798 and, as a result, Napoleon's ambition to take the war to the British in India came to an end.

In April 1801 came the Battle of Copenhagen. At that time, the Baltic was a vital source of trade and maritime supplies for Britain. So when in early 1801, under the influence of Russia, the Baltic and Northern states formed themselves into an 'Armed Neutrality of the North' and placed an embargo on British ships, the Government was to take action. Negotiations with the Danes broke down, a key member of the Armed Neutrality, and battle ensued. Nelson’s disregard for too timid higher orders gained the victory.

1805 brought the most famous naval battle in England’s history: Trafalgar. Having abandoned his plans for an invasion of Britain, Napoleon had now started a new campaign against Austria which had to be thwarted. Napoleon's navy, under the leadership of Villeneuve, was an excellent one and the combined forces of the French and the Spanish a formidable opponent. Britian's advantae was The Nelson Touch. Nelson and the British were thunderingly victorious. But the British navy, and the nation, suffered a great loss. Vice-Admiral Nelson was struck by a French sniper’s bullet during the action. Though he lingered long enough to learn that he had won the battle, he died on board his vessel The HMS Victory hours after being wounded, on the 21^st of October 1805.

*This name is so memorable that I've often wondered if Austen, who must have known the life story of the nation's living legend, borrowed Suckling for the bragging, affected Mrs Elton's so amusingly named relatives in Emma

Austen and The Picturesque. Part Two.

2007-07-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

While Horace Walpole's taste developed to appreciate the more grandly Gothic, and Thomas Gray the more neoclassical aesthetics of The Beautiful and The Sublime, the nitty gritty of the Picturesque was taken up by Wordsworth in poetry, William Gilpin in travel essays and Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight and, later in his career, Humphry Repton, in essays and landscape design. The popularity of the Picturesque owed much to the rhapsodizing essays of Gilpin, who transplanted the ideal from the paintings of Europe to the countryside of Britain, revolutionizing the pre-existing ideas about tourism and allowing more humble English scenery seekers to experience a tour of the landscape, a hereto aristocratic privilege, without going abroad.

Much like the fashion for Gothic novels, the rage the Picturesque, though not unsound in itself, rose to melodramatic and silly heights, as at Knight's residence Downton Castle for example, where 'large fragments of stone were irregularly thrown amongst briers and weeds, to imitate the foreground of a picture'. Austen represents the ideal has having qualities verging on the absurd, in Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, and even as dangerous in Sense and Sensibility, by associating the Picturesque with the exaggerated, emotion-driven and almost deadly sensibilities of Marianne Dashwood.

In Pride and Prejudice Austen touches but lightly on the ideal, in a short exercise in ridicule. When Caroline Bingley and Louisa Hurst oust Elizabeth Bennet from a walk with Darcy by positioning themselves in a way that monopolizes a garden path, Darcy tries to offset their rudeness by inviting her to continue with them regardless. Elizabeth replies 'You are charmingly group'd, and appear to uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth', indicating the enthusiasm for scenic objects grouped in threes by expounders of the ideal. This clever remark hints at the absurdity of Picturesque fastidiousness and casts that aura of silliness onto the trio, leaving the charming group, and The Picturesque, looking somewhat deflated.

To be continued

Georgian Resources

2007-06-29T20:54:00.000-07:00

New and exciting!

Finding that I didn't like the way that some literature was formatted online, that I wanted one simple home for my resources, and that I wanted to share the sources of my references made here, I decided to start another blog where I can do all that. Introducing!:

Georgian Resources

The site is in it's infancy at the mo but shortly there'll be a world of Georgian info available.

I mention the poem Tintern Abbey by Wordsworth? It's there! I quote directly from an online resource? It's there. I say Natalie Regensberg writes an awesome essay, or Dr Frances Wilson writes an awesome lecture? It's totally there! Want to read some Byron? Course you do! Just follow the Byron tag.

Obviously, I don't do all of my research online but if possible I'll include sites where you can read or, if that's not possible, buy the books I've consulted.

I'll be loading up all my references over this long weekend holiday, as well as drawings, paintings and photographs, and typing up poems, quotes and what nots to add there. If it's a reference or a research tool, you'll find it there. Enjoy!

Bits and Bobs From the Beeb

2007-06-29T12:41:00.000-07:00

I love searching through the BBC online archives on a quite afternoon, which today has turned up an audio tour of Austen's house in Hampshire, including readings from her letters, and a few Radio 4 interviews with interesting actors who have worked in Austen adaptations.

For eight years, from 1809 until her death in 1817, Austen lived with her mother, her sister Cassandra and their friend Martha Lloyd, in the village of Chawton in Hampshire. The cottage is open to the public as a kind of museum and after acquiring new funding, Austen's letters have become part of the displayed collection. Here is a guided audio tour of the cottage.

I really love the interviews I turned up this round. There is this 2002 gem with Harriet Walter, who besides being a thoroughly interesting, talented and intelligent woman, played Mrs John Dashwood in '95 Sense and Sensibility. Here she talks about playing one of Shakespeare's great women, Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing.

She has featured in two Austen adaptations, '83 Mansfield Park as Maria Bertram and '96 Emma as Mrs Weston. She's a lovely, clever, funny woman and in 2002 Samantha Bond played Lady Macbeth on stage with the super sexy, genuine, talented and, personally my favourite actor, Sean Bean.

Juliet Stevenson is one of a very small handful of truly brilliant actors alive today. As well as being a remarkably talented stage and screen actor, she known for her excellent narration of novels, including all of Austen's works (she was voted as BBC Radio's favourite reader) and radio work. She played Mrs Elton in the '95 Emma film, she's an absolutely fascinating woman and here Juliet Stevenson talks about her absorbing role in Tom Murphy's remarkable play Alice Trilogy.

You can play these radio items with Real Player, simply follow 'Listen to This Item'. If you need to install Real Player, you can download it from their website free of charge.

Austen and The Picturesque. Part One.

2007-06-28T16:29:00.000-07:00

The fundamentally Georgian notion of The Picturesque is alluded to by Austen in four of her novels: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and most often, in Sense and Sensibility, which is no coincidence, given that the Picturesque was, like the Gothic Revival, a movement rather of sensibilities, an offshoot of feelings in the reason-driven culture of the Enlightenment. To state that the Picturesque is simply a type of scenery, a genre of art and a method of garden and landscape design, is only to give the bones of the ideal without fleshing out the very real emotional power it had in the early years of the Romantic Period until, according to some scholars, it thinned out into hackneyed faddishness by the Regency.

An aesthetic appreciation of landscape was a practice that was realized during the Georgian era. This appreciation was inconceivable before the 18^th century and when it developed, it developed into a notion, and thence into an ideal, known as The Picturesque. A new way of seeing things requires learning, and a new way of seeing landscape requires travel and art, three experiences unavailable, especially combined, to practically none but the wealthy aristocracy at the beginning of the Georgian period. Like so many ideals, the Picturesque began with art, specifically the 17^th century continental landscape paintings of Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorraine and Gaspard Dughet (also known as Gaspard Poussin).

In England, landscape painting was a wholly foreign concept at this time. Landscape was merely a curtain dressing for the more interesting human drama and the land was something associated with peasants and labor, not subjects the monied classes thought of as artistically inspiring, and the very few who traveled in Europe, and wrote about it, before the Utrecht Treaty of 1713 wrote only of scenes such as the Alps, those darlings of the Picturesque, as inconvenient, uncomfortable and dangerous. Europe however, opened up to privileged English travelers after 1713 and The Grand Tour was born. Wealthy aristocrats on their tour favoured Italy in particular and started to take notice of these exotic landscape paintings, most commonly seen in Rome, and as a consequence, rapidly began to look upon the grand, rugged, alpine terrain, lurking banditti, swarthy peasants, and crumbling ruins not as tiresome, untidy inconveniences fraught with continental danger, but as the romantic subjects of art. An early associational link was made by Horace Walpole in a letter during his tour with Thomas Gray in 1739:

'Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings, Salvator Rosa!'

To be continued

Georgian Item of The Week

2007-06-26T15:12:00.000-07:00

Georgian Item of the Week presents:

The Big Three of The Napoleonic Wars: Well, Nel and Nap.
Part One.

Field Marshal His Grace Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington c. 1 May 1769 - 14 September 1852.

Portrait of The Duke of Wellington
1812
Francisco Goya
National Gallery, London

Born to an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family in Ireland, Wellesley joined the army in 1787. He fought against the French in Flanders and in 1796 went to India, where he achieved considerable military success, taking part in the Mysore War against Tipu Sultan. During the subjugation of the Mahrattas he achieved a remarkable victory at Assaye (1803).

On 18 June 1815, the army of Napoleon faced an allied force of British, Belgain and Dutch troops on a ridge outside a small Belgian town called Waterloo. The British Army in Belgium was lead by a man described by contemporaries and historians alike as possibly the greatest British soldier of all time. From India, where he campaigned to create the British Raj, to being the mastermind of the Peninsular War, which drove the French armies from Portugal and Spain, Wellington had never lost an engagement.

Nonetheless, Napoleon Bonaparte was a master of warfare. If the allied troops folded, the road to Brussels would be open and Napoleon would again be able to plunge Europe into war. To prevent this, the armies of Wellington had a hold a ridge overlooking a farm, until the Prussian army under General Blucher could arrive and hopefully defeat the French. It was an extremely close, long, devastating battle. By 10 pm on June 18th 1815 nigh on eighty thousand soldiers lay dead on the fields of Waterloo. But the British allied forces and Wellington were victorious and the battle, and it's ramifications would shape Europe for the century which followed it.

Sex in the Park. Mansfield Park. Part Seven - Conclusion

2007-06-26T02:01:00.000-07:00

I have to wonder if the Crawfords are not Austen's way of offering a lesson for the reader. Their attractiveness is undeniable and the narrative informs the reader that happy marriages would have come to pass between Henry and Fanny, and Edmund and Mary had the vanity and desires of Henry not overpowered his better feelings. Perhaps, as Mary is forced to see herself stripped of Edmund’s regard in their final interview, we the reader are forced in the final passages of Mansfield Park, by Austen’s skill as an interpreter of human desire, to acknowledge that even though she made the Crawfords bad, she still made us want them.

During Mary's very introduction into the narrative she betrays her ill-judging notions on sexual conduct when she talks lightly and laughingly of Henry's skills as a flirt and as a heart breaker to Mrs Grant, without a murmur of concern for the women he misuses. She declares that 'everybody should marry as soon as they can do it to advantage', and quickly surmises that Tom Bertram's wealth and the estate and title that would be his upon Sir Thomas' death, would exactly suit her matrimonial ideals and without any romantic inclination, she turns on the charm. She cleverly draws amusing stories from him in order than she may appear so winningly amused, and feigns an interest in his taste for horse racing. In the house chapel at Sotherton Mary shocks (the admittedly easily shocked) Edmund and Fanny by dwelling on what she believes to be commonly accepted female sexual fantasies. 'The former belles of the house of Rushworth' she imagines there pretending to pray with 'seeming piety, but with heads full of something very different--especially if the poor chaplain were not worth looking at' during the family church services of former days. Even while Edmund and Mary are developing feelings for one another, she mocks and mourns his choice of a sexually neutralized profession as a clergyman, rather than soldier, sailor or lawyer, and tells him repeatedly without disguise that she intends to marry a rich man, all of which he blindly assigns to wrongness in speech rather than in morals.

Fanny of course sees and experiences the reality of Mary's lax sexual principles. She observes Mary standing by happily while Crawford meddles with Maria and Julia, causing bad feelings between the sisters, destabilizing Maria’s engagement with Rushworth, and leading Maria seriously astray. When there are no Miss Bertrams to meddle with, Mary even sanctions Crawford's cold plan of a flirtation attack on Fanny, stating that 'a little love, perhaps, may animate and do her good' and working even as Crawford's agent to get the infamous necklace around Fanny's innocent throat.

Whilst Mary's questionable remarks and her culpability in the attack on Fanny could, without further missteps, have be set down as thoughtless and indecorous rather than amoral, towards the end of the narrative and at a distance from Mansfield, she betrays her truly unethical notions about sexual alliances. In her letter to Fanny at Portsmouth, she does not attempt to conceal her greedy glee at the prospect of Tom Bertram's illness leading to death, shifting the inheritance of Mansfield to Edmund and justifying, in her mind, a marriage between them. When of course the affair between her brother and Maria dashes these happy hopes, Edmund is finally undeceived as to the nature of her true sexual morality. She views the crime of the adulterers only as folly and the only shame being that they were caught, not that they have sinned, against God, against the law and against the sexual and social mores of the era.

I would happily bet money that every reader of Mansfield Park asks themselves, after the flight of Maria and Crawford, the elopement of Julia Bertram with Yates and the life threatening illness of Tom Bertram, before they have reached the concluding chapter that reveals all, 'But what's going to happen to Mary Crawford?' And though she does not sink to actual sin, it is her complete lack of sexual principles that costs her Edmund Bertram. The experience of Edmund has made her discontent with lesser men, however rich, and it is doubtful that her new standards for domestic happiness can be met by another.

Interestingly, shallow, greedy, manipulative and even amoral as she is, Mary is yet the most alluring young female of the narrative, even while Fanny is the most admirable. Complete as they are as characters, Fanny cannot tantalize, Julia cannot interest and Maria cannot charm but Mary can do all of these. Austen’s other major works also feature ladies who cannot get the man they want. But when Pride and Prejudice's Caroline Bingley can't manage to snag Darcy, when Isabella Thorpe is denied Captain Tilney in Northanger Abbey or when Elizabeth Elliot's hopes of her cousin are disappointed in Persuasion, the reader cannot care. Not only do we not care but we feel a kind of justice in the punishment they receive for the pain they cause our heroines. This isn’t the case with Mary Crawford for me. She’s no Fanny, it’s true. Fanny is the bright light in a rather dark story but Mary, unlike Austen’s other disappointed ladies is likable and, being intelligent, in a partnership with Edmund she must have improved. But how can a narrative like Mansfield Park, whose stance on sexuality is so staunchly unbending, reward the amoral principles and even, at times, the machinations of Mary Crawford, with an adoring Edmund and a happy marriage? It cannot.

Conclusion.

Visit the Sex in the Park tag for Part 1 - 6 of this topic.

Sublime Anxiety: The Northanger Canon

2007-06-22T16:48:00.001-07:00

The Northanger Canon is the collection of late 18th century ‘horrid’ Gothic novels that feature in the first work that Austen sold to a publisher, Northanger Abbey.

The book itself, first written in 1798 but not published until 1817, was simultaneously a defense of the novel as an art form, a celebratory sending up of Gothic fiction and, a warning about it. Austen herself enjoyed gothic fiction, especially the work of Ann Radcliffe, but she feared that the excessive romanticism and melodrama of the books incited impressionable girls to ape the manners, coquetry and faux sentimentality of a Gothic heroine, in search of the exciting adventures they found on the page. Seeking the danger and intrigue of a novel in their everyday lives could not but breed insincerity and vanity, and in Northanger, she gives us the portrait of just such a girl in Isabella Thorpe.

The literary Gothic grew out of many influencing factors and was the Romantic Period's appreciation and interpretation of the medieval. It ranged from elegant appreciations of the Gothic form, such as Wordsworth's poem Tintern Abbey, to the truly macabre novels of the canon and to the more philosophical horror of Mary Shelley, and Dr Frankenstein's Creature. The Gothic revival, which appeared in English gardens and architecture before it got into literature, was the work of a handful of visionaries, the most important of whom was Horace Walpole (1717–1797), novelist and man of letters. His 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto and the Gothic remodeling of his widely copied estate Strawberry Hill, ushered in an era that would last six decades.

Contributing influences included accounts of European travels, most notably those accounts of the well to do Grand Tour, which took English travelers through the Alps, invoking sublime horror, notions of lurking banditti and spurning on the Picturesque movement as well as the Gothic, and Graveyard Poetry, a genre popular in the first half of the 18^th century. It's subjects were, apart from graves and churchyards, elements such as night, death and hauntings, and everything else that would be considered irrational, and thus excluded, by the rational culture of the Enlightenment. It is the nature of the human mind to interpret the denied and excluded as mysterious and intriguing, and as such, elements of the Gothic novel that would keep the public coming back for more included more than just dungeons and skeletons: it was violence, murder, wealth, poverty and incest and its underlying current of themes often on the minds of the Georgians: Anti-Catholicism, eroticism, social freedom and illegitimacy.

The gothic novels that make up the Northanger Canon are:

The Mysteries of Udolpho 1794 by Ann Radcliffe
The Italian 1796 by Ann Radcliffe
The Castle of Wolfenbach 1793 by Eliza Parsons
The Necromancer: or, The Tale of the Black Forest 1794 by Carl Friedrich Kahlert
Horrid Mysteries 1796 by the Marquis de Grosse
The Mysterious Warning, a German Tale 1796 by Eliza Parsons
Orphan of the Rhine 1798 by Eleanor Sleath
Clermont, a Tale 1798 by Regina Maria Roche
The Midnight Bell 1798 by Francis Lathom

If you live in Virginia or plan to visit Charlottesville, then you’re in luck. And not just because Virginia is awesome, which it surely is. The Library of the venerable University of Virginia, founded in 1819 by none other than Thomas Jefferson, houses an unparalleled collection of first editions of the canon, as part of their wonderful Sadlier-Black Collection. Their website hosts photographs of the canon set, as well as blurbs and illustrations, along with those of the other classics making up the entire collection. Were I in Virginia, honestly, nothing could keep me away from that library. I highly recommend a read of the collection's introductory essay Sublime Anxiety: The Gothic Family and The Outsider by curator Natalie Regensburg, from whom I stole this post’s title. Nice one, Natalie. The absorbingly fascinating story of book collector Michael Sadlier, and how the quest for the canon books began, can be found here on the library’s website. The collection includes first editions of and illustrations from many other Georgian writers, including Mary Shelley and John Polidori, and a Victorian personal favourite, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Atlhough I’ve had The Mysteries of Udolpho and another Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, on my bookshelf for a while, I’ve only just started reading them, and they really are very addictive. There has been a revival of interest lately in the gothic novel and as Radcliffe, the 'Queen of Terror' is especially thought to have perfected the genre, her books are less difficult to find than the rest. Recently I was surprised and pleased to find them in the ‘classics’ section of a bookstore. Of the works however of Radcliffe’s ‘charming imitators’, as Austen wrote, there is a champion in independent publisher Valancourt Books. Bless their little gothic hearts for publishing the novels of many Austen era writers. They currently publish four of the canon titles: The Italian, The Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont and The Midnight Bell and have the others in the works. I’ll be purchasing these titles from Valancourt when I get a chance to read them and I put it out there that interested parties should do the same. One of the things I love doing as a human being is supporting independent thinkers, dreamers, artists and book-lovin’ entrepreneurs.

The pictures featured in this post are an illustration from The Mysteries of Udolpho,Vol. 4, p. 217 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1830) and the cover of The Midnight Bell, as published by Valancourt Books 2007.

Sex in the Park. Mansfield Park. Part Six.

2007-06-21T03:55:00.000-07:00

Due to the circumstance of his being wealthy and male, there is little in the way of physical punishment that could be handed down to Henry Crawford for his adulterous affair with Maria. Unlike his unfortunate guilty partner, there is no one with the power to shut him up in a far off cottage for the rest of his life, nor would society want them to. The sexual conduct of men was not judged by the same standards. Indeed, during Mary and Edmund’s final interview, where she hopes for a marriage between the sinners, she only speaks of Maria’s being able to recover her reputation, of her not being admitted into society, of her situation inciting compassion, because Maria’s situation is one of powerlessness and Henry’s is –unchanged. His uncle may well have had some financial power over him but, given the Admiral’s own lechery, it’s not likely that his nephew’s would be a reason for him to exercise it. Crawford’s income, his freedom and his character are preserved, no doubt suffering nothing worse from his fellow man than a few less invitations.

It would have been justifiable however and not entirely unexpected for Sir Thomas or Edmund to challenge Crawford to a duel for his dishonorable conduct with their kinswoman. We know that in Sense & Sensibility there is a meeting between Willoughby & Colonel Brandon after Willoughby's seduction and abandonment of Eliza and in Pride & Prejudice also, Mrs Bennet expresses a fear that her husband will duel with Wickham, the seducer of their daughter Lydia. But the Bertram men are not the dueling type, decorum weighs more for them than ego, and no such meeting befalls Crawford.

And though he suffers no physical or financial consequences, it is in the narrative’s power to deal a more serious and lasting blow to Henry Crawford, in the loss of Fanny. Had he not acted on motives of vanity and lust, in ‘the esteem and tenderness of Fanny Price, there would have been every probability of success and felicity for him.’ It is with Fanny as his wife that Crawford would have become the man he had potential to be, and given his lack of respect for any woman but her, there is little chance of marital happiness for him with another. The narrative makes it clear that before the scandal broke publicly, Crawford had hoped to get clear of Maria and marry Fanny, whom he is very much in love with, but in Mansfield Park, consequence must be reaped from sowing so very many seeds. For Henry Crawford there is 'wretchedness' in the outcome, and the knowledge that it was he who robbed him of his own future happiness, perhaps for life. Here there is 'self-approach', 'vexation and regret', and even Mary has the clarity to observe that her brother has ‘thrown away such a woman as he will never see again'.

To be continued

Books on Tape Techie Time: iTunes Audio Books

2007-06-19T22:59:00.000-07:00

For this post I’m only talking about Austen audio books available through iTunes. Another time soon I’ll be touching on the many, many audio books available elsewhere.

In my version of iTunes there are currently over 30 Austen audio books available for purchase. Personally, I really enjoy a book on tape, especially when narrated by someone who reads aloud well. There is a large selection out there and it can be tricky to hit on the right one and disappointing if you don’t, especially if you’ve forked out anything from ten to seventy dollars. There are a few things to look for that can serve as guidelines for the uninitiated. Sound quality & narration are very important, especially in a recording you want to listen to more than once. Actors are often employed for narration and though I do like the practice, not all actors are necessarily good at voice work and narration. A lot of books on tape are read by actors whose talents are fine on screen but their skills don’t really translate to the spoken word. I recommend looking for an actor whose voice is expressive and enjoyable to listen to and preferably, who has experience in theatre or radio plays. Often Austen books are narrated by an actor who has featured in one of the film adaptations.

As far as sound quality goes, in iTunes there is a preview button feature in the space where you look up the details of a particular recording, which allows you to listen to a couple of minutes of the recording for free.

There is also abridgment to be considered. I wouldn’t normally recommend or buy an abridged edition, where some of the book is cut to make the recording shorter. But sometimes the abridging is done without losing too much around the edges, none that you would notice unless you were very familiar with the book in question, and abridged editions are almost always cheaper. It’s probable that if an abridged recording was narrated really well by a good actor and reasonably priced that I’d buy it.

I have scoured the details and listened to the previews of all the audio books available through my iTunes for a few recommendations.

Abridged:

Pride & Prejudice read by Joanna David
Recorded by Penguin Classics $AU14.99

Emma read by Fiona Shaw
Recorded by Penguin Classics $AU10.99

Mansfield Park read by Harriet Walker
Recorded by Penguins Classics $AU20.99

Unabridged:

Lady Susan, The Watson & Sanditon read by Norma West
Recorded by ISIS Audio Books $AU50.99

Pride & Prejudice read by Emilia Fox
Recorded by Naxos Audiobooks $AU62.99

Sense & Sensibility read by Susannah Harker
Recorded by BBC WW $AU46.99

These recordings aren't cheap, there's no denying that. But I've found that I've kept & still listen to a few very good tapes I have, (yep, that's cassette tapes. I still have my walkman too) especially Tess of the d'Urbervilles read by Lindsay Duncan around '90 which I snagged at a swap meet.

A note on CD burning, recordings purchased via iTunes are copy protected and it's not possible to burn them. Believe me, I've tried. But for the more virtuous among us, fear not. Burning recordings that are published by specific media is not illegal or unethical and for tips on recordings that are in the public domain, free and therefor allowed to be copied, check this space for more shortly upcoming editions of Books on Tape Techie Time.

Sex in the Park. Mansfield Park. Part Five.

2007-06-19T13:59:00.000-07:00

Despite their attractiveness & appeal to everyone at Mansfield par Fanny, in Henry & Mary Crawford's shadowy background, there always hovers the spectre of the sexual misconduct of their friends & relations. The Crawford’s parents, including the one they share with Mrs Grant, are dead and the siblings have been reared by their uncle & aunt, the Admiral & Mrs Crawford. The opinions and behaviour of the elder Crawfords, whose marriage was unstable, unhappy and mutually disrespectful, set the tone for the younger from an early age, and their principles were formed, as Mrs Grant so aptly puts it, “in a bad school for matrimony in Hill Street”. Upon Mrs Crawford’s death, the Admiral promptly installs his mistress into the same household, prompting Mary to seek a home at the parsonage with Mrs Grant, where Henry accompanies her. Their very entrance into the Mansfield Park narrative & neighborhood is a result of the amoral sexual liason forged by their guardian, and moreover, among their friends & their society, there are many circumstances where lax sexual principles are the norm. Throughout the narrative Mary tells of her girlfriends attempting alternatively to seduce or trick Henry into marriage, and tells tales of his aggressive flirtations & intrigues amongst their acquaintance. “If your Miss Bertrams do not like to have their hearts broke, let them avoid Henry”, is her warning to Mrs Grant. Mary too has formed a limited opinion of the opposite sex, and one may not infrequently perceive that she views an opportunity for aggrandizement, & greed, as normal motives for marrying. She speaks of friends in London, particularly of Mrs Fraser & Lady Stornaway, during her residence at Mansfield and upon eventually meeting them, Edmund represents the former as “a cold-hearted, vain woman, who has married entirely from convenience” and the latter as “the determined supporter of everything mercenary and ambitious”. The message is clear. The Crawford siblings, though brilliant, clever and charming, are in possession of some corrupted sexual mores.

To be continued

Georgian Item of the Week

2007-06-19T08:35:00.001-07:00

Weymouth Bay:Bowleaze Cove and Jordan Hill
1816-17
John Constable
National Gallery, London

Ah, Weymouth. Doesn't it just make you think of Frank Churchill & Jane Fairfax?

Plain Jane: Is "Becoming" an Excuse to Morph Austen Into a Pretty Romantic Lead?

2007-06-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

Maybe.

I’m not sure if Anglo/American cinema quite knows how to deal with writers who are women & who aren’t notably eccentric or extraordinarily different. Literary figures such as George Sand (the nom de plume of Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, Baroness Dudevant), played by the ageless and radiantly talented Judy Davis in the 1991 film Impromptu, might perhaps be meaty material a for a director to approach because of her mould-breaking flamboyance. Sand, in the 19^th century, regularly dressed in mens’ attire in public, lived apart from her husband, traveled abroad & had affairs with the likes of Chopin & Liszt. The 2003 BBC doco/reenactment Frankenstein – The Birth of a Monster wonderfully chronicles the life Austen’s contemporary Mary Shelley, her confident & unconventional choices and her dramatic life with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron & their absorbingly interesting posse. But what to do with female writers who, however talented, are domestic, rooted in small circles and family life, busy, healthy & happy?

Though interested in the recently released Austen biopic Becoming Jane I am wary of pending disappointment due to her very normality and quiet lifestyle, especially after the 2006 Miss Potter, a biopic (or faux biopic, rather (Fiopic!)) of children’s book writer and illustrator Beatrix Potter which I had at the time looked forward to for months. Potter, among other distinctions was a widely respected botanic illustrator, farmer, conservationist and expert mycologist but Miss Potter reduced her to a dithering wet blanket who made up little stories about bunny-wunnys and lived in an imaginary world. Frankly, I don’t have high hopes that Austen may fare any better in Becoming Jane, which I gather tows the line that Austen became a great writer because of a the trauma of a unfulfilled youthful romance, and not because of talent, intelligence, clarity, hard work & a maturity beyond her years.

The trailer for the film is not promising, simply placing Austen herself in the character of Elizabeth Bennet with the exact story line of Pride and Prejudice and tacking on the exact same music from the hugely successful ’95 Sense & Sensibility, I kid you not. I’m willing to hope however that the trailer pirates have yet again spliced a movie to make it look like something it’s not in order to get the masses into the cinema. According to said trailer pirates, the masses need a hell of a lot of prodding. I’m familiar with the events the film is based on and with Jane Austen’s letters, and since I’ve found out that the very real and fascinating characters of Eliza de Feuillide and Ann Radcliffe are portrayed along with the protagonists, I’m still curious enough to want to see it upon its release here in Vancouver.

I’ve read several articles recently that express disappointment that a beautiful American woman, Anne Hathaway, was cast to portray an English writer who has always been considered by public opinion as somewhat plain and spinster like. This belief is based on the only portrait of Austen known as a certainty to be her, a drawing done by her sister Cassandra. Putting aside the possibility that Cassandra’s talents in portraiture may not be great, I have no issue with what Jane Austen might have looked like, or with Hathaway playing her. Frankly, Austen’s appearance will never matter to me, as her looks have nothing to do with her books. As for Hathaway’s American-ness, she is an actor and it’s her job to embody a character, no matter how different they are from her, ethnically or otherwise. Anne Hathaway does seem to be a bit of a Disney product thus far, the “thinking-little-girl’s princess” as it were but I’m prepared to hope for a deeper performance here than she has yet had an opportunity to give.

On a related note, I am saddened and angered that in this modern, more feminist world Helen Trayler, managing director of publisher Wordsworth Editions, has had hair extensions and make up put on to Austen’s portrait on a book cover. "She was not much of a looker” and “If you look more attractive, you just stand out more” according to Trayler. Heaven forbid the day when the merits of us all are judged solely by Helen Trayler’s standards. Whilst Anne Hathaway is embodying Austen as an artist, Trayler is actively distorting her real portrait to sell more books. The Cassandra portrait in question hangs in the National Gallery and though highly disrespectful to artist and subject as it is, the portrait is in the public domain and the distortion of it is not illegal, however unethical.

Sex in the Park. Mansfield Park. Part Four.

2007-06-17T19:13:00.000-07:00

Maria Bertram is of course the character who suffers the worst change of circumstances and the most dire consequences for her sexual misdemeanors in Mansfield Park, and it is with the arrival of these dashing and careless Crawfords that she begins to act on motives of sexual attraction and jealousy. Maria has, rather understandably, no love for her fiancé, the thick-headed and decidedly un-sexy Rushworth, to whom she has become engaged because he is very rich and very manageable. Maria cannot marry her catch until her father’s return and it’s no surprise that a flirtation with ‘the most agreeable’ and ‘so well made’ Henry Crawford is a welcome distraction from the tedious attentions of her dull fiancé. But the kicks she gets out of triumphing over her sister at Crawford’s displayed preference, out of his compliments and insinuations, out of his longing glances and lingering touches, draw Maria past her ability to control her desires and her actions. As their flirtation reaches indecorous and indecent heights, as the time of Sir Thomas’s return to England and thereby, her unwelcome wedding to Rushworth, draws closer, Maria begins to expect a proposal from Crawford that will satisfy her every inappropriate hope, that is, to free her from one cumbersome fiancé and supply her with a sprightlier one. Crawford makes no such proposal, withdraws in fact, on Sir Thomas' arrival, from the neighbourhood and Maria is left to become a hurt and bitter Mrs Rushworth.

Some months after the happy event, when the Crawfords and Rushworths meet in society in London, Henry Crawford finds the woman who so lately could not resist his charms cold and reserved. Unwilling to be got over, however much he does not love her, Crawford persues another, more licentious flirtation with Maria, one that results this time in amoral goings on, a sex scandal and a search party. When Maria leaves her husband’s house in hopes of a life with Crawford, necessitating a search and rescue from sin mission on the part of the Bertram men, she leaves behind her her respectable family life, her wealth, her position in society and even her freedom. With the subsequent media circus, divorce from Rushworth, and with Crawford showing no inclination or intention to marry her, Maria is left with no options, no resources, with an irredeemably muddied reputation and, in the religious views of the era, a soul stripped of virtue and sullied by sin. Though too kind to cast her off into the abyss, Sir Thomas will not tolerate the disgraced Maria in the untainted halls and shrubberies of Mansfield Park. He installs her in a country cottage in a distant county and the unlucky young woman is to pass her life, once so brimming with potential, shunned by her family and former friends, and with the officious Aunt Norris as her constant companion, you can well believe that she would truly feel the punishment doled out for her violation of sexual mores by Mansfield Park.

Austen in 2008

2007-06-14T10:22:00.001-07:00

I don't often fully enjoy Austen screen adaptations, simply because the depth of the narratives get lost due to a focus on the central romance, which is usually the least interesting part of the story. When the narratives are modeled solely as a romance and their subtle nuances are stripped away, you tend to be left with a corsets & carriages piece aimed mostly at the female market and though amusing enough at face value, they can hardly convey the multi-layered undertones and developments of Austen's writings. But some clever people have given it a bash and done very well and I tend to think of a good adaptation as a nice addition to the books, sort of like the cappuccino froth on an already good coffee.

PBS has recently issued a press release announcing that they will be embarking on a Jane Austen season in January 2008. Four of the titles—Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Emma and Pride and Prejudice—were adapted by Andrew Davies, Mansfield Park is a coproduction of Company Productions and WGBH Boston. Persuasion is a Clerkenwell Films production for ITV in association with WGBH Boston and Miss Austen Regrets, a true story based on Jane Austen’s own letters and diaries, will be part of the four-month marathon.

What I'm really interested in here is the new Sense & Sensibility, which is presently in production by the BBC. It's hard to go too far wrong with Andrew Davies. I recently watched his Northanger Abbey and was rather pleased with it, Felicity Jones is charming in it, and of course his '95 Pride & Prej and '95 Emma are widely considered to be the best adaptations of those novels.

'07 Persuasion is pretty good, it's watchable and enjoyable enough but lacks the depth, insight and excellent performances of the '95 film, which is resplendent with the likes of Amanda Root, Fiona Shaw, Sophie Thompson, Victoria Hamilton, Phoebe Nicholls, Corin Redgrave and Ciaran Hinds. Still, while it lacks and sags a little, I'd catch it. There is enough there to intrigue an avid Persuasion fan and pique the interest of a new one

However, '07 Mansfield Park is a travesty that doesn't deserve a screening. The script is woeful and the acting couldn't save it even if it was good, which it isn't. It's bloody terrible. I watched 20 minutes before deleting it forever from my computer and regretted the bandwidth used up to download it, and I won't harp further on it's absurdity for fear of never being able to stop. To compare, the '83 Mansfield Park may have it's faults but it's a million times better than this dreck, despite actress Sylvestra le Touzel and director David Giles getting the character of Fanny Price all wrong. If you can put aside Touzel playing Fanny as if she were an 85 year old moral despot, and Giles apparently giving her no direction not too, except to cry, fidget and look scandalized more, than it's actually a very faithful narrative and not at all un-enjoyable. Although I recommend fast forwarding the scene where Sir Thomas confronts Fanny over refusing Henry Crawford's proposal. It's cringe worthy. Angela Pleasence's wonderfully idle Lady Bertram is so fundamentally insipid and sedated and out of it, that were she a modern day housewife, you'd swear she was on Valium, and Anna Massey and Jackie Smith-Wood hit the Mrs Norris and Mary Crawford nails on the head perfectly. Interestingly enough, Touzel does a lovely job of playing Mrs Allen in '07 Northanger Abbey.

Dreck notwithstanding, maybe I'll buy a TV by January because I wouldn't mind catching Jane Austen Sundays.

Sex in the Park. Mansfield Park. Part Three.

2007-06-13T17:27:00.000-07:00

There is no sexual deviance under the roofs of the Mansfield rooms, naturally. Woe betide the unthinking young Master or Miss who has misbehaved under Sir Thomas’ delicate watch. The extravagant ways of his son and heir Tom Bertram causes Sir Thomas much grief, and his drinking, gambling, partying and general gadding about like a young, rich & fashionable man about town has cost so much money as to necessitate the selling of the chief Mansfield living to Dr Grant. But Tom’s antics never include the lecherous. There is never a hint of womanizing, of a seduction or even of flirtations. Tom could have been as sexually careless as Sense & Sensibility’s blackguard Willoughby if he’d chosen to and without any real consequence, but never in his father’s reproaches or in his own stories is any such behavior alluded to. Similarly, the others who dwell peacefully at Mansfield all have their faults, except Fanny of course, but none of these faults are of a sexual nature. The girls are chaste; the wives are well behaved, Edmund is intellectual and the old boys are respectable. Because sex is the defining moral point of Mansfield Park, the line that deems a character irredeemable once it has been crossed. Their great moderator Sir Thomas is called away to far off Antigua and his departure is followed by the arrival at the parsonage of the delightful and charming Mary and Henry Crawford, brother and sister to Mrs Grant. And, delightful and charming though they are, the Crawfords' vanity, self-obsession and potent sexuality wreck havoc with the once dormant desires of the residents of Mansfield.

Regency or Georgian or Napoleonic or Vaguely Related Item of the Week

2007-06-12T11:52:00.000-07:00

A Painter's Studio
c. 1800
Louis-Léopold Boilly
National Gallery of Art Washington DC

Even though I could blog (verb? Totally) possibly endlessly about strictly Austen topics, once a week, possibly more often but at least this one is in a specific format, I'm going to go down the culturally significant road and post an item that is, as so aptly stated above, linked to the Georgian period. It might be about a book that influenced Austen, an author she influenced, music, art, decor or even Regency adventure travel. Anything could happen.

Sex in the Park. Mansfield Park. Part Two.

2007-06-12T11:04:00.001-07:00

Even from her infancy the evils of an ill-judged sexual alliance are working against our heroine. The marriage of her aunt Lady Bertram to the wealthy baronet Sir Thomas had given rise to hopes that the other two sisters would likewise do well for themselves from the connection to a nobleman with considerable influence, power and wealth and from the opportunity to meet and captivate rich men themselves by socializing in Sir Thomas’ circles. Alas, Sir Thomas’ very domesticated habits were never likely to produce many such opportunities and though the eldest secured a home for herself with Mr Norris in the Mansfield parsonage, Fanny’s mother though ‘quite as handsome’ as her newly minted sister, threw herself away on a ‘Lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune, or connections’ and into a thankless life of poverty, toil and child bearing without management, cleanliness or manners, with almost no education for her children and without even respectability for herself or her family. Such was Fanny’s early life in Portsmouth and the circumstances that made Mrs Price not at all unwilling to give Fanny up to the Bertrams. The poverty of the Price family is a continual influence over Fanny, even when enveloped in the elegance and serenity of Mansfield Park, as she is never able to shake off the coils of dependency. She can never be an equal there and is always to be grateful and humble, to be handy at all times and yet never in the way, to be servile and yet cheerful, self denying and never complaining. As Mrs Norris would say of Mrs Grant, that 'a fine lady in a country parsonage was quite out of place’ so too is a fine lady out of place as a drunkard seaman’s wife in Portsmouth.

Sex in the Park. Mansfield Park. Part One.

2007-05-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

No matter how many times I read Mansfield Park, how excellent and complete the narrative, how much I sympathise with Fanny Price, her plight, her desires, her goodness and her motives and no matter that I know that Fanny finally getting Edmund Bertram is just and ought to be gratifying, I still really want her to marry Henry Crawford. If for nothing else but the chance of a promising sex life which, let's face it, isn't very likely with Edmund. But I guess that's kind of the point. Mansfield is undoubtedly Austen's most moral work. In the other novels, faults of judgment are corrected with a life lesson; Emma's quest to win back Miss Bates' trust after mocking her publicly, for example, in Emma or Captain Wentworth's finding himself insuperably tied to Louisa Musgrove in Persuasion, and faults of character are dealt with by the lack of respect for them engendered in the reader and the assumption of an unpromising future, such as Wickham and Lydia's early fizzling marriage in Pride and Prejudice or the Thorpe family's seemingly likely decline into ruin and disgrace in Northanger Abbey. But in Mansfield Park, the narrative goes much further in the punishment of those who act on motives such as greed, vanity and, especially, inappropriate sexual attraction. Oh yeah.

Old Bits & Bobs from The Beeb

2007-05-21T15:45:00.000-07:00

Idly wading through the vast BBC radio archives online this afternoon I came across a few Austen related bits and bobs from the past. To listen to the interviews follow the links and click the Listen to This Item button.

Ten years after playing Elizabeth Bennett in the BBC Pride and Prej, Jennifer Ehle discusses playing the lead at the Old Vic in The Philadelphia Story with her old Mr Wickham, Adrien Lukas.

Now, I kind of completely love Emilia Fox and she is one of my absolutely favourite young actors. Fans of the 1995 BBC Pride & Prej will have seen her play Georgiana Darcy so charmingly and as she does a lot of work in TV and on stage in the UK, I don't see much of her here in Canada. But she has so much charisma and seems so lovely and intelligent. She played the heroine in a 1997 Masterpeice Theatre production of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, the DVD of which is sitting patiently in my Amazon wishlist, played Dorotea in The Pianist and here, amongst other things, Emilia Fox talks about playing Madame de Tourvel in Les Liasons Dangereuses on stage in 2003, all of which I love.

Author PD James has the hots for Persuasion's Captain Frederick Wentworth. Well, don't we all.

For the First Time: Dashed Off Letters, Taking the Water and the Gentle Art of Being an Excellent Walker

2007-05-20T21:21:00.000-07:00

While it is true that a book, or whatever object the old metaphor is applied to, ought not to be judged by it's cover, never let it be said the cover isn't yet significant. At fourteen years old I hadn't yet read any Jane Austen, and though I read constantly, my exposure to books that weren't Enid Blyton or on the school list and/or didn't involve vampires, preferably, or adventures on the other side of wardrobes or looking glasses, was minimal. But I was however seriously into black and white movies and spent most of my early teenage years watching them, reading books and devoting much time and energy to clandestine smoking. Clearly, I did little homework. It was through one of these b&w movies that I first came across Austen, thanks to the Laurence Olivier phase I was in and the 1940 Pride and Prejudice adaption he was in. Incidentally, that phase started with my catching Lady Hamilton, also more sensationally billed as That Hamilton Woman in the US, on TV one Sunday afternoon. The same movie also was the first small grain in my interest in all things Georgian (era not country) including of course, literature.

Though I wasn't overly crazy for the Pride and Prejudice film, there was something about the dialogue and the story that intrigued me. I found the novel in my school library, checked it out, and didn't read it. Probably too busy reading Anne Rice novels and smoking and watching movies, habits which contributed no doubt to my leaving high school shortly thereafter at 15 and getting a job in a technical bookstore. Suddenly I had money. Not much but enough for a trip to blessedly air conditioned shops in the city on Fridays to buy a book, see a movie and drink coffee (from an espresso machine! Crazy). In a bookstore there where I was probably looking for a new Anne Rice novel, there was a table loaded up with Wordsworth Classics going for three or four dollars. I perused them enthusiastically but didn't recognise any names or titles except for Dracula and Frankenstein, which I'd naturally read, until I came across Persuasion by Jane Austen. The volume was slim and the book's billowy cover caught my fancy, as it were. I remember reading on the inside that the painting was called April Showers Bring May Flowers. Back in the day in Western Australia, I always enjoyed showers. That of course was before I moved to Vancouver and despair over the rainy weather often makes me want to set myself on fire. But anyway, the book cover appealed to me, the girl and the colours in her dress, the shower and garden, and remembering how I had liked the style of the dialogue in the film, I bought it.

It might seem excessive to say that a three dollar copy of Persuasion I'd bought when I was 15 influenced my life, but it did. I fell rapturously in love with the book, and with the writing style, intelligence and insight of Jane Austen and with the small window of time and the places she wrote about. I rapidly worked my way through all of her writings and thanks to my local library, onto many more authors who I may never have read. A whole new world opened up to me then, of things I knew very little of at the time..the classics of European literature, art and music and even interiors, landscaping and of course, tea (made from real leaves! Crazy). And l reckon that the landscape gardener who had the most lasting influence over the parks and shrubberies of the era has the best nickname ever: Capability Brown.

More than ten years on, Persuasion is still my favourite book. I so admire and enjoy the story, the character insights, the satire and the fun of course, but it will also always be the first really adult book I bought with my own money, for myself. And thanks to my much indulged obsession, when I inevitably went back to school three years after buying it, I got an A for an English essay I wrote on Persuasion. Crazy.

NB
I don't smoke anymore Mother and Certain Other Readers, so stop looking at me like that. You know how. Thank you.