Austenian scholarship would do well to emulate Mozartean scholarship; in Le Faye’s Chronology of Jane Austen and Her Family we finally have an equivalent to Deutsch’s superb Mozart: Dokumenten seinen Leben, published in English as Mozart: A Documentary Biography. (Le Faye in fact surpasses Deutsch in inclusiveness, as there are more Austen family materials in existence – bank records, diaries, letters – that she is able to cull.) Therefore, might we hope that someday Austen’s letters will be published intermingled with the letters of her family, in emulation of Mozart: Briefe und Auszeichnungen. This seven-volume set includes the grand tour travel diaries of Mozart’s sister and father as well as other family writings, and is comprehensively annotated and indexed (the index alone comprises one volume; the letters, four volumes; the remaining two are all commentary). Continue reading “ESSENTIAL AUSTEN: Jane Austen’s Letters AND Austen Papers (a review)”
Month: December 2008
Jane Austen this Weekend ~ Persuasion
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You MUST make a reservation: please call the number below
Jane Austen Weekends The Governor’s House in Hyde Park 100 Main Street Hyde Park, Vermont series 1: Persuasion Friday – Sunday, August 15 – 17, 2008 Friday – Sunday, September 5 – 7, 2008 Friday – Sunday, December 12 – 14, 2008 Friday – Sunday, January 9 – 11, 2009 series 2: Pride and Prejudice Friday – Sunday, January 30 – February 1, 2009 other dates to be announced call or E-mail for reservations 802 888-6888 info@OneHundredMain.com
A leisurely weekend of literary-inspired diversions has something for every Jane Austen devoteé. Imagine a literary retreat that will slip you quietly back into Regency England in a beautiful old mansion where Jane herself would feel at home. Take afternoon tea. Listen to Mozart. Bring your needlework. Share your thoughts at a book discussion of Persuasion or Pride and Prejudice and how the movies stand up to the books. Attend the talk entitled “The Time of Jane Austen”. Test your knowledge of Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice and the Regency period and possibly take home a prize. Take a carriage ride. For the gentleman there are riding and fly fishing as well as lots of more modern diversions if a whole weekend of Jane is not his cup of tea. Join every activity or simply indulge yourself quietly all weekend watching the movies. Dress in whichever century suits you. And imagine the interesting conversation with a whole houseful of Jane’s readers under one roof. Weekend guests have commented that they wish there had been a tape recorder under the dinner table so they could replay the evening again and again. It won’t be good company; it will be the best! It’s not Bath, but it is Hyde Park and you’ll love Vermont circa 1800. Jane Austen Weekend rates start at $295 for singles, $260 per person for doubles, $235 per person for triples, and include two nights’ lodging, Friday evening’s talk over dessert and coffee, full breakfast on Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon tea, Saturday dinner and book discussion, early Sunday Continental breakfast, and the Jane Austen quiz with Sunday brunch. Add Thursday night or Sunday night or both and get the room for half the regular rate. 9% Vermont tax is additional. The usual cancellation policy applies. Please inquire about the special rate for book groups which can also reserve a Jane Austen weekend on dates other than those regularly scheduled as availability permits. Or come for just an evening and choose from these activities:
Informal Talk with Coffee and Dessert, Friday, 8:00 p.m., $14.00 Afternoon Tea, Saturday, 3:00 p.m., $20.00 Book Discussion and Dinner, Saturday, 7:00 p.m., $35.00 Jane Austen Quiz and Sunday Brunch, Sunday, 11:30 a.m., $15.00 All four activities: $75.00
Please call or write for more information and book directly with the inn at 866-800-6888 or info@OneHundredMain.com. |
100 Main Street • Hyde Park, VT 05655
phone: 802-888-6888 • toll free: 866-800-6888
email: info@onehundredmain.com
Austen on the block ~
A copy of Austen’s Persuasion, a first American edition, sold at a Bloomsbury auction on December 10 for $3000. Here are the details:
88. AUSTEN, Jane (1775-1817). Persuasion. Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1832. 2 volumes. 8vo (193 x 116 mm). Publisher’s linen-weave cloth-backed boards, paper spine labels, uncut. Condition: rear endpaper lacking in second volume, loss to lower corner of same in first volume, some very light scattered spotting in first volume; labels chipped to remnants, light shelfwear with some minor exposure to board edges. Provenance: J. Kellog and Co., Mobile, Alabama (contemporary bookseller’s label to front pastedown); V. Russell (contemporary owners signature in top margin of titles). a wholly unsophisticated copy of the first american edition, unut and in original boards. Austen’s last completed novel, originally published with Northanger Abbey in 1818, here making it’s first appearance in United States. A scarce edition, of which only 1250 copies were printed. “Relatively few copies of the 1832-33 Philadelphia editions are known to survive” (See Gilson p.98). This copy without the publisher’s catalogue, but Gilson states that not all copies had them. Gilson: B3
Sold for $3000
Sale NY022, 10th December 2008
A note on Pride & Prejudice
Just found this blog-surfing… food for thought; weigh in and comment if you will; I just couldn’t let this slip by:
From David Ottewell’s blog, quoting David McNulty’s blog:
[McNulty] I finally got round to reading Pride and Prejudice. It’s brilliant in all the ways people say it is, but there were points about three quarters of the way through when I was thinking – get on with it. Am I just a philistine or could she have done with a good editor?
[Ottewell] Great stuff. Actually, when it comes to Pride and Prejudice I am sympathetic to the fictional diarist Adrian Mole, who (from memory) was sacked from a library for moving the collected works of Jane Austen from the ‘classics’ section to ‘light romantic fiction’…
[Comments]
I think P&P is a bit of a girl thing!!
Posted by: Kate | December 11, 2008 11:46 AM
Kate,
Yeah, maybe. But I honestly think – and stop me if I am going to far – that Jane Austen is nothing more than an witty, perceptive chronicler of the dull and pointless mores of dull and pointless people, at a dull and pointless time. With a couple of Neighbours-style will-they-won’t-they sagas thrown in to keep people reading. Posted by: David Ottewell | December 11, 2008 12:01 PM
I guess Austen’s tales contained some of the original love/hate will/they/won’t they plotlines (A Lizzie Bennett and Darcy-style relationship is a chick flick staple) so I think dismissing them as ‘Neighbours style’ is a bit harsh!! Sense and Sensibility is a gorgeous story of sisterly love and romantic redemption and has for P&P, well, without it we would never have had that Colin Firth wet shirt moment would we?
Posted by: Kate | December 11, 2008 01:50 PM
Taming of the Shrew? Pamela? (Both of which are rubbish, anyway.)
Posted by: David Ottewell | December 11, 2008 02:12 PM
Actually, thinking about it, I think Beatrice and Benedict from Much Ado About Nothing are the best will they/won’t they pair (and early than Lizzie/Darcy). Especially as they are old foes, and get tricked into falling in love.
Posted by: Kate | December 11, 2008 02:38 PM
I’ve often felt that the YES campaign’s stream of statements saying that they are outraged and demanding that people apologise to them had the whiff of an Austen character.
Anyway David, 24 hours from the biggest political event in Manchester’s recent history and you’re offering lit crit on a one-on-one basis to your readers. Impressive multi-tasking.
Posted by: Nigel | December 11, 2008 04:01 PM
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Hurray for Kate, whoever you are!
What Cinderella lost at the ball…
To the Cinderella who lost her black earring at the Austen Tea on Sunday, December 7 (at Champlain College): We have it! contact us at jasna-vt [at] hotmail [dot] com.
Random jottings…
Just some random thoughts this week ~ no rhyme, no reason ~ from a dictionary on the gentleman’s collar to a review of the latest book about Dickens….
- Fashion thoughts: everything you ever wanted to know about the gentleman’s collar
- Regency romance: A Wallflower Christmas” (St. Martin’s, 2008 ) by Lisa Kleypas: this historical romance takes readers to England’s Regency period, where a young innocent abroad, under pressure from his father, must choose between love and duty
- Some thoughtful review questions for Pride & Prejudice at http://apbaionedoda.blogspot.com/2008/12/review-materials-for-pride-and_07.html
- treat yourself to a visit to Factual Imagining, a blog about film adaptations of English history and literature, and scroll through the last few weeks of posts about Austen-related movies and various other costume drama news !~ there is even an interesting deleted kiss between Elinor and Edward (the Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant version) on YouTube!
- Food & Drink in Regency England by Laura Wallace (an outdated page, but with some great recipes]
- An article in the New York Times “Book Club Trouble Often Has Little to do with Books” – the highs and lows of these gatherings, and how even the suggestion of an Austen or a Trollope title can send people scurrying to the door! [I know this to be true … it has happened in my book group!]
- Another book on Dickens: see this book review in the NYTimes:
THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS: How Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits, by Les Staniford [Crown, 2008]
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The Man Who Invented Christmas
- READ THIS before you buy any books this season: Michael Dirda at the Washington Post on The 10 Commandments of Book Giving
- Gifts for the Bookish at Book Hunters Holiday blog
- this is really cute: Austenbook on Pride & Prejudice
- the Janeite Supply Shop at Cafe Press offers all manner of shirts and buttons, and signs and bags, all to do with Jane or Darcy or Knightley or Henry Tilney….
- Laurel Ann and Ms. Place trade off on views of the book Two Guys Read Jane Austen…. they want your views on why “real men are not afraid to read Jane Austen” ~ click here to give your opinion. And see our own Janeite Kelly’s review of the book here
- And for some ideas for that “manly” man in your life, especially those most deserving ones who read Jane Austen, head over to The Art of Manliness for their Manly Holiday Gift Ideas ~ there are some great ideas and more in the many comments…
Some Book Reviews of Note ~ All Things Austen
[These are some book notes and other Austen-related tidbits that I have picked up over the past few weeks ~ more book thoughts for holiday gift giving to be posted shortly, but this is a start]
Two new books about Samuel Johnson are reviewed by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker in his article “Man of Fetters: Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale” ~ Peter Martin, Samuel Johnson [Harvard, 2008] and Jeffery Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle [Basic, 2008]
Reginald Hill, The Price of Butcher’s Meat [Harper, 2008] … NYTimes Book Review with Marilyn Stazio; Hill does Jane Austen in this story, a la Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon with a story about Sandytown- in Yorkshire, and with all the usual suspects and detectives.
Mrs. Beeton’s The Art of Cookery, noted on Regency Reader; another Mrs. Beeton read is the biography The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton, the First Domestic Goddess, by Kathryn Hughes [Knopf, 2006] and now available in paperback. This study of Beeton also reveals much about the homelife of the Victorians.
“Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: an intimate history of domestic life in Bloomsbury” by Alison Light [Bloomsbury Press, 2008]. Review at the NY Times by Claire Messud.
“Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners”(Random House; $30), by Laura Claridge, is the first full-length biography of the author to appear. (Post’s son, Ned, published an affectionate, ghostwritten memoir, “Truly Emily Post,” back in 1961.) Here is a review in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Madame de Stael: the first Modern Womanby Francine de Plessix Gray [Atlas, 2008]. Reviewed at Slate. by Stacey Schiff.
And this Our Life: Chronicles of the Darcy Family Book 1, by C. Allyn Pierson, and published by iuniverse, another sequel to Pride & Prejudice starting where P&P leaves off with Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s engagement and their first year of marriage. See this article at the Wall Street Journal online.
A found diary of a Victorian woman has recently been published: Ellen Tollet of Betley Hall by Mavis Smith. Tollet was an upper class woman who lived in North Staffordshire in the 1800s, and the diary runs from 1835-1890. Mavis Smith found the 160-year old manuscript hidden in the Shropshire library archives; click here for more information and how to obtain a copy [Waterstones, Amazon.uk and local museums]
A new book on the cultural history of Reading, England gives a nod to Jane Austen as she went to school there. See this article in the BBC Berkshire site.
The University of Manchester Library announces the acquisition of the Gaskell – Green letters (link is to Rare Book Review), adding to their already extensive Elizabeth Gaskell collection. “The Gaskell – Green family (Gaskell’s friend Mary Green and Mary’s daughter Isabella) letters offer fascinating insight into Cheshire town daily life, the place where Gaskell had grown up in the first half of the nineteenth century, and which she later immortalised in her novel Cranford.”
The short story competition sponsored by the Chawton House Library will have Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith(faboulous read by the way!), as the chair of the judging panel. “The competition is aimed at raising the profile of the library, which is home to a collection of books by early English women writers. The library is part of Chawton House, home to Jane Austen’s brother Edward. The shortlisted stories will be published as an anthology, Dancing with Mr Darcy, by independent publishers Honno in October 2009. First prize is £1000 plus a week’s writer’s retreat at Chawton House.”
[See this article at Bookseller.com as well as the Chawton House Library site for information on the competition.]
Here are a few blogs of note, lately discovered:
- Idolising Jane authored by Old Fogey, asks some telling questions about Austen…see the blogfor some thoughtful posts [and with thanks to Ms. Place at Jane Austen Today]
- Catherine Delors, historical novelist and author of Mistress of the Revolution, authors a wonderful blog titled Versailles and More, a visual feast of life during the French Revolution and 18th century France. Today, Ms. Delors offers a post on Saint Nicholas, the True Santa Claus.
Regency Christmas Anthology ~ an e-book
I append this post from another blog: the We Write Romance Blog
A Regency Christmas Anthology by Carolynn CareyWhen, in the spring of 2008, I was offered the opportunity to submit a novella for a proposed Regency Christmas anthology, I was delighted. After all, I love the Regency period, and I love the traditions of Christmas.
But I realized, of course, that tremendous differences exist between Christmas as it was observed in England in 1816 and Christmas as we celebrate it in America today. I immediately understood that I needed to do considerable research into the traditions of a different time and a different culture.
Fortunately, since I’ve had a long-time interest in the Regency period, I already possessed quite a few research resources. I delved into my files and soon found myself learning about the Christmas traditions during the Regency period. This in turn led to my writing a story called “A Tradition of Love” about Alethea, who adores Christmas, and her new husband, Robert, who says he has no time for trivialities such as Boxing Day, the Wassail Bowl, the Christmas Candle, the Yule Log, and Christmas Dinner. With just three weeks to go before Christmas Eve, Alethea struggles to find a way to teach her solemn husband to accept help with his responsibilities and to join her in creating their very own Christmas traditions.
“A Tradition of Love” is one of four novellas that make up the anthology entitled A Cotillion Country Christmas, to be released December 4, 2008, as an ebook by Cerridwen Press. The first story, “A Christmas Surprise” by Cynthia Moore, features Clara, who has loved Julian since she first saw him at a debutante ball in London. Several years later, Julian is forced to marry Clara because of gambling debts. After traveling to India soon after their marriage, Julian is now returning home for the holidays and Clara uses the magical spirit of Christmas to her advantage.
Amy Corwin is the author of “Christmas Mishaps” in which the magic of Christmas transforms a series of misfortunes into a gift of love for Caroline Bartlett. Now it is up to her to overcome her mistrust of the unexpected offer from a younger man.
And Barbara Miller’s “Country House Christmas” tells the story of Diana Tierney, who is so caught up in the past mystery of why Richard Trent was shipped off to war that she doesn’t realize he is coming to love her as much as she has always loved him.
Jane Austen’s Christmas
In my email today, the latest newsletter from the Jane Austen Centre in Bath: see this link to an article on “Christmas Day with the Austen Family.”
And on my bookshelf … I highly recommend the book Jane Austen’s Christmas: the Festive Season in Georgian England, compiled by Maria Hubert [Sutton Publishing, 1996] (the book is out of print: search at www.biblio.com or www.abebooks.com; available copies are mostly in the UK).
Hubert offers a mix of selections from Austen’s novels and letters, and from other contemporary writers; there are poems about Christmas, along with games and dances and recipes ~ all accompanied by black and white illustrations from various sources. It is a must-have addition to your Austen collection.
You can visit this link at The Christmas Archives for a few excerpts from the book, as well as information on several of the author’s other books on Christmas (Shakespeare’s Christmas; Brontes’ Christmas; Christmas in Wartime are a few examples.]
Here is one of the excerpts ~ a recipe for
BLACK BUTTER
Black Butter would have been a novel recipe indeed, which one of the Austen’s wide circle of seafaring family and friends might have brought them.
Take 4 pounds of full ripe apples, and peel and core them. Meanwhile put into a pan 2 pints of sweet cider, and boil until it reduces by half. Put the apples, chopped small, to the cider. Cook slowly stirring frequently, until the fruit is tender, as you can crush beneath the back of a spoon. Then work the apple through a sieve, and return to the pan adding 1lb beaten (granulated) sugar and spices as following, 1 teaspoon clove well ground, 2 teaspoons cinnamon well ground, 1 saltspoon allspice well ground. Cook over low fire for about ¾ hour, stirring until mixture thickens and turns a rich brown. Pour the butter into into small clean jars, and cover with clarified butter when cold. Seal and keep for three months before using. By this time the butter will have turned almost black, and have a most delicious flavour.
Copyright Maria Hubert von Staufer March 1995
[I will be posting more on the holidays in Jane Austen’s time after our tea this weekend!]
Life in the Country (a review)
In time for holiday giving, Life in the Country should find a pleasant reception. Pairing the prose and letters of Jane Austen (in quotation format) with the fine artistic narrative of her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, Life in the Country provides visuals and words that both entertain and entrance. Accompanying essays provide nice overviews of Jane Austen; silhouettes in general and Austen-Leigh’s work within the genre; and a concise discourse on Austen-Leigh by his great-granddaughter Joan Austen-Leigh. Serious scholars will be able to delve deeper into various topics thanks to the short bibliography. (Though heavily centered on Austen scholarship, the list does include such as Sue McKechnie’s British Silhouette Artists, a must-have reference for those interested in this art form.)
Jane Austen in Vermont 