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Part II: Interview and Book Giveaway! ~ Why Jane Austen? by Rachel Brownstein

BookLady Deb31 Comments

Contrary to the main current of popular opinion today, Jane Austen’s novels are not first of all and most importantly about pretty girls in long dresses waiting for love and marriage; and they are not most importantly English and Heritage, small and decorous and mannerly and pleasant. Read with any degree of attention, they do not work well as escape reading: there are too many hardheaded observations and hard, recalcitrant details in them…  
[ Rachel Brownstein, Why Jane Austen? p. 247]

 

Hello Professor Brownstein! And welcome to Jane Austen in Vermont. 

I had the pleasure of hearing you read from your newest work Why Jane Austen? at the JASNA-Massachusetts May meeting [see photo below].  You have very graciously agreed to this interview (as well as to speak at our June 2012 JASNA-Vermont gathering!] – so I heartily welcome you today to discuss your new book on Jane Austen. 

JAIV:  You strive in this work to undercut conventional thinking on Jane Austen, by offering us a good number of “essays” on novels, authorship, women writers [but much on Byron!], neighbors, gossip, language, biography, the importance of re-reading – you move from the real life, the fictions, the use of words, and personal anecdote in such a seamless weaving of thoughts, that I marvel at the weight of each sentence [for example, I love this one:  “Emma is as nosy as a novelist about private lives” [p. 223] – one could think about that sentence for hours! 

But to start, just tell us a little about why you titled your book Why Jane Austen?

RB:  The book asks why there is so much interest in this particular long-dead woman novelist: why Jane Austen right now and not, say, George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, or Jane Austen’s contemporary, the novelist and poet Charlotte Smith?


JAIV:  And one must ask about the cover! – Who decided to use the Jane Austen action figure?

RB:  It was I who brought my action figure—along with other pieces of Austeniana I own–to the office of Columbia University Press.  It was the brilliant art director who decided to put it on the cover, and the brilliant photographer, I think, who placed the figure on top of the books. 


JAIV:  I completely agree with your insistence on calling her “Jane Austen” – unable to call her “Austen” (“would have startled her, makes me wince a little” [p. 11]), nor just “Jane”, nor certainly “Dear Jane” – why is this so for Jane Austen and for no other author?

RB:  I think it’s Claire Harman, in her book, “Jane’s Fame,” who observes that she’s the only author people call by her first name alone.  This is a really interesting question.  I think she’s “Jane” because of a mix of doting indulgence and a condescension that verges on contempt—the kind familiarity brings.  It’s partly a function of her being a woman, and unmarried, and long-ago, and therefore girlish, and in some way small—you know, they talk about her small canvas, her narrow range.  It’s deplorable, really—and really a function of misreading her novels as merely delightful.


JAIV:  One of the main themes in your book is based on the Katherine Mansfield quote that serves as an epigraph:

 “The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone – reading between the lines – has become the secret friend of their author.”

Is this why you think that Jane Austen has and continues to have such a profound pull on her readers?

RB:  Yes.  I think her conspiratorial confidence in her readers is flattering and engaging.  After all, she’s so smart and so charming, and she takes us into her confidence. 

JAIV:  Your first chapter begins with Pride and Prejudice and its emphasis on “truth” – the first sentence staking its claim on the rest of the novel with this term: “it is a truth universally acknowledged” (certainly the most discussed opening line in literary history!) – you say the word “truth” occurs in Pride and Prejudicetwenty-four times, and one of your main themes is to show the power of the novel to reveal truths. This isn’t a question, but please explain a little if you can.

RB:  One of the reasons I start there is to begin to suggest it’s worth looking at the words in Jane Austen’s novels—not only the stories and the characters and the themes, but the words that convey all those.  Also, the great matter of truth is the question about novels, isn’t it: why spend time reading fictions that don’t tell you anything that’s true? What’s the value of other people’s fantasies? What can we learn from novels?  What truths do they have to tell?  Jane Austen wrote that novels are about human nature; George Eliot suggested later on that novels give a reader “a shape” for her “expectations.”  Neither of these is clear, but both seem to me very suggestive.   

Jane Austen’s novels, it seems to me, raise questions about the language in which we say what’s true and not true, and therefore about the capacity to know and tell truths, or the truth.

 

JAIV:  Your seminal book Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels was published in 1982, and re-published in 1994 with a new postscript.  You were then trying to place your own learning and thinking and writing in the context of the feminist criticism of the previous decade.  Are there any shifts in your thinking since then that you could comment on? [You mention that this new book is really an atonement – that such previous readings of Jane Austen as “a paragon of proto-feminist romance” are misreadings, i.e. “not reading her as she is meant to be read.” [p. 8]  – and that Why Jane Austen? is written in “defense of Jane Austen and in self-defense as well…” [p. 10]]

RB:  I’m a little tongue-in-cheek about the matter of atonement, and a little serious too.  I’m sorry about some things that have been done in the name of feminism, but I continue to be a feminist, and a feminist literary critic, and I am especially feminist as a meta-critic, or critic of the critics.  It seems to me immensely important that Jane Austen was a woman. 

Austen’s relationship to romance is complicated: she wrote romances that are also anti-romances.  Reading them as books about women’s issues, I think, does Jane Austen a disservice. They are about men and women, and dreams and realities, and greed and social climbing.  She said they were about human nature; and she adds that they are written in “the best chosen language.” My argument is that it’s worth paying attention to all of that, not only to some of it. 


JAIV:  Again about Becoming a Heroine: Would you write about the same books today? [note: Heroine contains a full chapter on Jane Austen that touches on all her novels; the other works discussed in separate chapters are: Richardson’s Clarissa; Charlotte Bronte’s Villette; The Egoist by George Meredith; George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady; and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf] 

RB:  No—but I still love all those novels, and enjoy teaching and talking about them. 

JAIV:  So if “No”, what works would you write about now?

RB:  I don’t think I can answer your question about the books I’d include in another version of “Becoming a Heroine”–I’d have to write another book. In other words, the novels I DID write about there come together in a series or sequence that (to my mind) suggests a development in the idea of a heroine. A novel reader who has an even slightly different idea could set up a different sequence of novels.  So no, there’s nothing I’d change, unless I changed everything–or something basic in the central idea.


JAIV:  This new work is similar to Heroine in being more a meditation on Jane Austen, combining scholarly and textual analysis, literary biography, historical context, all melded together with your own story as a reader, a student, and a teacher.  I found it a very engaging read, each sentence packed-full, the approach to the subject very different from the usual scholarly work.  As soon as I finished, I knew a re-read was required, not to mention the need to re-read all of the novels and look again with your critical eye!  If one could take only one thing from this book, what would you want it to be?

RB:  Thank you for your very kind words.  The one thing I would want a reader to take from my book is this: go and reread Jane Austen!


JAIV:  You write constantly posing questions to the reader – a wonderful teaching strategy! – and especially effective in one’s efforts to make a “Life of Jane Austen” out of the details in the novels – and in our efforts to find her in her characters, in her language, in her plots, we find her all the more illusive..  We cannot help ourselves – we have only such scant tidbits of information! Why do you think this is a dangerous approach?

RB:  It’s dangerous if you believe the life story you compose for Jane Austen—but taken with a grain or two of salt it’s fun. 

JAIV:  Your personal story that you so generously weave through this book is similar in some ways to William Deresiewicz’s new work A Jane Austen Education [and he indeed writes a lovely blurb for your work on the jacket cover (note: this is quoted in yesterday’s post)] – at least your “confession” of early on being way too clever and cool to read Jane Austen, then later way too clever and cool to not be in the know about Jane Austen – do you think that this is still the view of readers / non –readers of Jane Austen?

RB:  Deresiewicz, who is a generation younger and a man, says he started out thinking those classic novels were dull and boring, and not for readers like him. My story is very different.  When I was in college—and I went to a woman’s college, in the mid-1950s–literary girls were expected to know Jane Austen without taking a course in the novels.  My freshman English teacher engaged me in a conversation about Pride and Prejudice although it was not assigned reading: it was as if just because you were a young woman reader you already knew your Jane Austen.  Things are different now: being in the know about Jane Austen has changed a lot since then.  Today, for many people, it means being up on the latest pop-cultural Jane-related phenomenon, the zombies or whatever.


JAIV:  Any comment on Deresiewicz’s book? – it seems to have generated mixed reviews.

RB:  Let’s take another page from Jane Austen’s book—Northanger Abbey—and leave the reviewers out of it.  The Deresiewicz book is a lively read and the voice is engaging.  And I am amused by the idea of a man owning up to learning life lessons from Jane Austen. 

   
JAIV:  I like your answer of taking that cue from Jane Austen! 

There are a number of anecdotes you tell where you put yourself in time and place (and these are not always pleasant encounters!) – is there any concern of people discovering themselves between the pages? – or is everything politely disguised?

RB:  I don’t know about politely.  I scrambled details, left things out, and added bits, and no one actually real is all there, I sincerely hope.  You’ll recognize the echo of Henry Austen: my aim was to write about human nature, not individuals.


JAIV:  Which Jane Austen novel did you first read? Does it remain your favorite? [a horrible question, but one must ask!]

RB:  Pride and Prejudice: a predictable answer, but one must try to tell the truth. 

JAIV:  Your commentary about the movie adaptations – “adaptation is translation” [p. 35] is a wonderful essay.  You mention loving “Clueless” – can you share what other of the various adaptations worked the best? The least?

RB:  I admire Roger Michell’s beautiful film version of Persuasion, and I found lots to like in the astute choices made in making the Emma Thompson -Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility.  And of course I love the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice—so much that Joe Wright’s version, starring the thoroughly miscast Keira Knightley, seems to me all wrong.

JAIV:  The inevitable Sequels / Continuations question:  What are your thoughts!?

RB:  Some work; others don’t; several work well in parts, but don’t measure up.  Jane Austen sets the bar very high.  I was surprised and delighted by the first half of Colleen McCullough’s The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet.   


JAIV:  Well then, I must ask what you think about the second half!

RB:  I was disappointed in the second half of “Miss Mary Bennet” because the emphasis moved–disproportionately, I felt–from Mary to Darcy, and the plot thickened too much.  I liked the stuff that seemed Austenian but a little outre–Mary and her money falling in the muck–and was less interested in the stuff about enslaved children imprisoned in caves.  It is of course very professional–being by a pro–but then it gets extravagant and falls apart.  It’s Darcy’s fault.


JAIV: Oh dear! – I thought Darcy could never be at fault for anything! 

But as for another of Jane Austen’s heroes, you call Edward Ferrars “morose, depressed, self-involved, and boring” [p. 247] – are you in the camp of preferring Colonel Brandon as the more proper mate for Elinor? What then happens to Marianne?

RB:  I was writing as a reader, not a novelist. 

 JAIV:  Good answer! 

You speak of Jane Austen’s best readers being those who feel they are complicit with her take on human nature – I could say the same about your writing – you invite the reader into your secret world of ‘Understanding the truth about Jane Austen’ – you brought me into your world years ago when I read of you [in Heroine] as a fifteen-year-old hiding out in the bathroom reading Henry James hugging your “secret knowledge that [your parents] were harboring a viper in their bathroom.” [p. 5]  I love this!  Do you find students still coming to you with that wide-eyed wonder of discovering literature as transporter, as transformer?

RB:  Yes.  This is one important reason why I continue to love teaching.


JAIV:  You make many references to “best readers” or “reading well” or “close readers”  – how I would have loved to taken one (or more!) of your classes, where you question, question, question, to make the student sit up, take notice, and shift his / her thinking –  [you offer a wide range of bibliographical references that shall add weight to my bookshelves and deduct funds from my book budget!] –  How does one become such a reader without going back to school?!

RB:  I’m with Elizabeth Bennet, when she tells Lady Catherine, of her and her sisters, that “We were always encouraged to read.”  Read and reread, is my advice—and don’t believe everything you read.


JAIV:  Your chapter on “Why We Reread Jane Austen” focuses on Emma – and you devote a number of pages to just the use of the word “understanding” – can you tell us a little about this?

RB:  I’m fascinated by the word and by the process of coming to understand something or someone and by what Locke called “the understanding,” the mind.  And you can see that word as a key to Emma, where insistent repetitions of the word begin to make the reader understand its shades of meaning.  The heroine prides herself on her understanding, or intellectual power, but she misunderstands what’s going on, and imagines mutual understandings among her friends—relationships, we call them–that sometimes do and sometimes don’t exist. 


JAIV:  Your last sentence:

 “And in the face of the Kindle and the Nook, the iPad and the graphic novel, not to mention the ongoing crisis in education and the widely lamented decline of serious reading, there is some anticipatory nostalgia as well for the once-thriving, once-glamorous, once-literary book business.” 

Can you explain your concerns?

RB:  I was nostalgically harking back to a time when the book business was more literary, and not so commercially driven. 

 
JAIV:  In your Heroine, you tell an amusing anecdote about visiting your Doctor and his comments about Georgette Heyer, and in so doing give a lovely tribute to her writings.  Have you continued to read her?  Can I ask that horrible question again of which is your favorite? 

RB:  I haven’t read Heyer for such a long time – I adored all the novels with their saucy heroines years ago; I’m going to revisit them again; but I’m afraid I have nothing more to say about them now… sorry! 


JAIV:  The oft-asked question of a writer:  How do you work? 

RB:  In fits and starts—and with a lot of false starts.  I’ve finally learned to write on my laptop, but I still have to print the thing out and go over it with a pen, and that remains my favorite part of the writing process.


JAIV:  And finally, have you ever written any fiction yourself?  Is there a novel in you somewhere??

RB:  Yes I have, and Yes I think there is, but No, I’m not ready to talk about it.


JAIV:  Anything else you would like to share? 

RB:  Thank you.  I enjoy the opportunity to clarify what I might have left unclear, and I enjoy the chance to keep on talking about Jane Austen.  One of the things I learned from Lionel Trilling—the mid-20th-century critic whose last unfinished essay, “Why We Read Jane Austen,” is echoed by the title of my book—is that the conversation around Jane Austen is almost as interesting as what she herself says.  I am always eager to engage in that conversation, which always interests me.

JAIV:  Thank you so much Rachel for joining us today – it is true that the conversation around Jane Austen is endlessly interesting! – and your book asks many probing questions of its readers for those conversations to continue!  

l. – r.: Marcia Folsom, Rachel Brownstein, and Nancy Yee,
JASNA-Mass Meeting, May 2011 at Wheelock College
[photo – D. Barnum]

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 Book Giveaway!

If anyone has a comment or a question for Professor Brownstein, please post it on either this post or yesterday’s post – – you might like to answer “Why Jane Austen? in your own life! –

 You will be entered into the Book giveaway random drawing for a copy of Why Jane Austen?  – the deadline is midnight next Wednesday night August 10, 2011 – Winner will be announced on Thursday August 11, 2011  [worldwide eligibility].

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Why Jane Austen?, by Rachel Brownstein
Columbia University Press, 2011
ISBN:  978-0231153904 ; $29.50
search inside at Amazon.com

About the Author: Rachel M. Brownstein is professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of two critically acclaimed books, Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels and Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française.

Click here for my review and bibliography. 

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont
Austen Literary History & Criticism · Books · Collecting Jane Austen · Jane Austen · Jane Austen Popular Culture · Literature

Part I: Rachel Brownstein on Why Jane Austen? ~ An Interview and Book Giveaway!

BookLady Deb39 Comments

Why Jane Austen? indeed! We might all ask that of ourselves, the question of why she is still avidly read these 200 years later; why the movies; why the many continuations, the fan fiction and the mash-ups; why all the Austen-related blogs and social networking sites; and why the continuing scholarly interest in finding and discussing yet another approach, another meaning.  A few years ago we had Jane’s Fame by Claire Harman (Cannongate, 2009) and Jane Austen’s Textual Lives by Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford, 2005), both brilliant analyses of the past two centuries of Jane Austen studies and cultural popularity.  Now in the bicentennial year of Austen’s first published work, Rachel Brownstein has given us an engaging treasure-filled meditation on Jane Austen as writer, woman, social commentator, and 21st-century icon.  Don’t miss reading this book…

I had the good fortune to hear Dr. Brownstein speak to the JASNA-Massachusetts region this past May.  Brownstein has been one of my very own heroines ever since the publication of her Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (Viking, 1982), where she weaves her own personal narrative into an analysis of the various feminist literary critical approaches to late 18th and 19th century literature.  Heroine is notable also for its loving critique of Austen’s six novels – it is a must read.  [She further discusses Richardson’s Clarissa, Bronte’s Villette, George Meredith’s The Egoist, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.] 

But what I love most about this book was her own story, her hiding in the bathroom at fifteen, behind a locked door, discovering literature, and “feeling transformed into someone older, more beautiful and graceful, moving among people who understood delicate and complex webs of feeling, patterned perceptions altogether foreign to my crude ‘real’ life … [all the while hugging] the secret knowledge that [her parents] were harboring a viper in their bathroom.” [p. 5] – didn’t we future English majors all find ourselves in that bathroom?

So what does an early feminist critic make of Jane Austen’s continuing popularity? And how as an English professor does Brownstein  make Jane Austen relevant to a college student in the 21st century, most all baffled by and suspicious of Austen’s world where “virgins are bent on finding rich husbands and no one works”, where everything is really about love and money, but we are shown nothing of the sex or the working [quoting Brownstein, May, 2011].

At this May talk, Dr. Brownstein read from her first chapter, surely making each of us wishing to be transported into one of her classrooms, to have her question our complacent assumptions, to dare to strip the works of all the critical analysis and take each sentence, each word back to the writer who wrote them – she dares us to be better readers, closer readers, understanding more with each re-read.  What does Jane Austen say to us and why does she continue to speak to us 200 hundred years later? 

I read this book on the heels of William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter (Penguin, 2011) – also a meditation of sorts, a very engaging personal one on how reading each of the novels changed the author’s life, each chapter a probing essay on how he saw way too much of himself in the least–liked of Austen’s characters.  Deresiewicz’s is an easy read, a well-written journey of discovery and we willingly and happily go along for the ride, having countless ah!-ha! moments as we nod in agreement at his insights.  But while Brownstein’s Why Jane Austen? is similar in its personal aspects, it is a far more scholarly text, with extensive notes, referencing previous criticism, biographies and popular culture run amok [what she calls “Jane-o-mania”, deliberately following the term “Byromania’ [p. 6]] with such a slight-of-hand, so jam-packed, that just like an Austen novel, a re-read is absolutely required!

Deresiewicz, incidentally, offers a lovely tribute on the cover of Why Jane Austen? – it is worth sharing:

Why Jane Austen? Is a warm-hearted, personal, and humane meditation on Austen and Austenolatry.  It is also in the tradition of Becoming a Heroine, smart, witty, eloquent and joyfully wide-ranging, a mixture of anecdote, cultural criticism, biography, literary history, and close reading.  By bringing serious literary thought to a wider audience – the book is accessible to anyone acquainted with Austen’s novels – it performs one of the most important services of humanistic scholarship.

I cannot say it better myself! In this book where the emphasis in on truth, the truth that fiction affords us, Brownstein shows us by beginning her work with an epigraph of Katherine Mansfield’s famous comment on Austen:

The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone – reading between the lines – has become the secret friend of their author.

– she shows us that we who read and re-read Austen indeed become sure and fast friends, illusive though she be.  Brownstein just brings us closer, and it is a lovely journey.

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Book Giveaway!!

Dr. Brownstein has been most gracious in doing an interview here at Jane Austen in Vermont [as well as coming to speak to our JASNA-Vermont region in June 2012! – we cannot wait!]  Please join me tomorrow when I post the interview, and hear directly from Prof. Brownstein as to “why Jane Austen?” –  any comments and questions will be forwarded to Dr. Brownstein for her response – you indeed might like to address “Why Jane Austen? in your own life!

 You will be entered into the Book giveaway contest for a copy of Why Jane Austen? by leaving a comment on either this post or on tomorrow’s interview – the deadline is midnight next Wednesday night August 10, 2011 – Winner will be announced on Thursday August 11, 2011  [worldwide eligibility].

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Further reading:

**Note the following upcoming event: Reading at Gibson’s Bookstore, Concord, NH. Thursday, August 25 at 7 p.m. – come in costume! see the flyer here: Why Jane Austen

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BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Works: 

Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. New York: Viking, 1982 [reprinted Columbia UP, 1994 with a new postscript]

“ChosenWomen.” Out of the Garden: Women Writing on the Bible.  Ed. Christina Buchmann and Celina Spiegel. New York: Ballantine, 1994.

“Endless Imitation: Austen’s and Byron’s Juvenilia.”  The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf.  Ed. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 122-37. [reviewed in JASNA News:  http://www.jasna.org/bookrev/br222p17.html ]

“England’s Emma.”  Persuasions 21 (1999): 224-41.

“The Importance of Aunts.” Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions. Ed. Regina Barreca. Lebanon, NH: UP of New England, 1994.  [pp.]

“Interrupted Reading: Personal Criticism in the Present Time.”  Confessions of the Critics. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1996. 29-39.

“Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice.” The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 32-57.

“Out of the Drawing Room, Onto the Lawn.”  Jane Austen in Hollywood. Ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield. Lexington, KY: UP Kentucky, 1998. 13-21.

 “Personal Experience Paper.” Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing. Ed. Deborah H. Holdstein and David Bleich. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2001. 220-31. 

“Rachel, au Coeur des lettres.” Rachel, Une Vie Pour le Théâtre, 1821-1858. Paris: Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judäisme, 2004.  41-55.

“Romanticism, a Romance: Jane Austen and Lord Byron, 1813-1815.”  Persuasions 16 (1994): 175-84.     

Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comedie-Francaise. New York: Knopf, 1993. 

Book Reviews:

Rev. of Jane Austen, by Deirdre Le Faye. http://www.jasna.org/bookrev/br153p25.html

“Tenderized.” Rev. of The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett.  Commonweal 135, 10 May 2008.

Rev. of Our Kind: A Novel in Stories, by Kate Walbert. WSQ: Gender and Cutlure in the 1950s. 33. 3-4 (2005): 365-68.

“What Becomes A Legend.”  Rev. of Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates, and Seeing Mary Plain, by Frances Kiernan. The American Prospect, August 28, 2000.

Rev. of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, by Judith Thurman.  Boston Sunday Globe, October 31, 1999.

Rev. of God’s Funeral, by A.N. Wilson.  Boston Sunday Globe, June 20, 1999.

Rev. of I Married a Communist, by Philip Roth. Commonweal, January 15, 1999.

Rev. of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom. Boston Sunday Globe, November 1, 1998.


Recent web articles and links:

A radio interview with Mark Lynch of “Inquiry” on WICN (90.5 FM), on NPR:
http://www.wicn.org/podcasts/audio/rachel-m-brownstein-why-jane-austen

Rachel Brownstein’s response to the Kathryn Sutherland kerfuffle last November on the Language Log blog: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2805

The Daily Beast – her response to V. S. Naipaul on Jane Austen http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/23/jane-austen-unsentimental-writer-for-our-times.html

The Huffington Post:  Jane Austen books you may not have discovered yet – Professor Brownstein offers up 11 lesser known works:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-m-brownstein/jane-austen-books_b_885281.html#s298967&title=Northanger_Abbey

The Page 99 Test blog: http://page99test.blogspot.com/2011/06/rachel-brownsteins-why-jane-austen.html

An essay by Professor Brownstein at Austenprose:  http://austenprose.com/2011/06/28/why-jane-austen-blog-tour-with-author-rachel-m-brownstein-and-a-giveaway/

An essay at the Montreal Review:  http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Jane-Austen.php


Reviews of Why Jane Austen?:

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Gina Barreca: http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/37550/37550

At The New York Times:  “Lessons from Jane Austen” by Miranda Seymour: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/books/review/book-review-a-jane-austen-education-and-why-jane-austen.html?_r=2&ref=review

at Simple Pleasures Books blog: http://simplepleasuresbooks.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/book-review-why-jane-austen-by-rachel-m-brownstein/

at Bluestalking Blog:  http://bluestalking.typepad.com/the_bluestalking_reader/2011/06/why-jane-austen-by-rachel-brownstein.html

this just added: “A Pleasure, but not a guilty one” at Commonweal.com –  http://commonwealmagazine.org/verdicts/?p=413

 Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont
Jane Austen · Literature · Museum Exhibitions · News · Social Life & Customs

The Penny Post Weekly Review ~ All Things Austen

BookLady Deb1 Comment

The Penny Post Weekly Review

  July 2, 2011

The Circulating Library:

JASNA.org in celebration of and preparation for the Fort Worth AGM on Sense and Sensibility has posted a partial bibliography of readings in Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line – http://jasna.org/agms/news-articles/about-ss-reading.html

The British Library announces an iPad app accessing 19th century books http://www.bibliolabs.com/.   Users can experience the British Library 19th Century Historical Collection App for free from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

Also the British Library and Google Books are hooking up:  http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/The-British-Library-and-Google-to-make-250-000-books-available-to-all-4fc.aspx

Drury Lane theatre 1794 - Houghton Library

The Houghton Library at Harvard – their digitization project – this week they have added the following early 19th century drawings of English theatres: http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/deepLink?_collection=oasis&uniqueId=hou00540

Victorian Secrets revives the works of neglected nineteenth-century writers and makes them available to the modern reader. Although over 60,000 novels were published during the 19th century, only a very small number have remained in print. See here for their catalogue:   http://www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/

Notable Women Authors of the Day by Helen C. Black

Charles Darwin’s Library:  http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/darwinlibrary

The James Boswell Library at LibraryThing:  http://www.librarything.com/profile/JamesBoswell

Nothing to do with Jane or literature, but take a look at this virtual exhibition of sheet music at the Library at Monash University: http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/exhibitions/stardust-melodies/

Beatrix Potter at the Free Library of Philadelphia:  http://libwww.freelibrary.org/blog/index.cfm?s=

Illus from A Happy Pair, 1890


Articles of interest:

This one has been everywhere but need to repeat out of an attempt to cover a week in the world of Jane Austen, so who can resist this!:  Kate Middleton and Jane Austen are cousins:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/28/kate-middleton-jane-austen-cousins_n_885899.html

“The Fathers of Jane Austen” – by Myretta Robens:  http://www.heroesandheartbreakers.com/blogs/2011/06/jane-austen-fathers

“The Country House and the English Novel” – by Blake Morrison at The Guardian:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/11/country-house-novels-blake-morrison?INTCMP=SRCH

An essay on Keats’s grave at Victorian Poetry Network: http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/2011/05/the-allure-of-keatss-grave/

Keats's grave in Rome - Wikipedia

William Cowper witty?? – see this essay by Robert Pinsky at Slate on Austen’s favorite poet:  http://www.slate.com/id/2297526/


Books of interest:

By Austen: all six Austen novels will be published as “flipbacks” in November:  http://www.flipbackbooks.com/index.html – For more information on this new book phenomenon (slightly larger than your iphone) hoping to outdo ebooks, see this essay at philobiblos: http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2011/06/flipbacks.html

And Austen in the Baby Lit series along with Shakespeare: http://tinyurl.com/439ygyf


The Music Trade in Georgian England, edited by Michael Kassler. Published August 2011; Hardback ISBN 978-0-7546-6065-1: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754660651

Savage Grandeur and Noblest Thoughts: Discovering the Lake District 1750 – 1820: Exhibition Catalogue Published to Accompany Exhibition at Wordsworth Trust 1st July 2010 – 12th June 2011; By Cecilia Powell and Stephen Hebron: http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Grandeur-Noblest-Thoughts-Discovering/dp/1905256426

Review of Vauxhall Gardens: A History, by David Coke and Alan Borg:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/01/vauxhall-gardens-history-coke-borg

Review of Roy Strong’s Visions of England: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/01/visions-of-england-roy-strong-review

A Book List:  if you are looking for a book list, go no further that “Best Holiday Reads” at The Guardian where writers share their favorite works – no Austen I’m sorry to say, but read Antonia Fraser’s account of reading Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time – just a great story! http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/17/best-holiday-reads?INTCMP=SRCH

Auctions:

Bonham’s Sale 19483 – The Helmut Joseph Collection of Important Snuff Boxes, London, New Bond Street, 5 Jul 2011 at 10:30: http://www.bonhams.com/eur/auction/19483/

A Meissen gold-mounted oval snuff box, circa 1750-60 - Bonham's

Bonham’s auction shoe archive [absolutely fabulous images!]: http://bonhams.com/usa/auction/19239/lot/1195/ – and an essay with images at Booktryst: http://www.booktryst.com/2011/06/vintage-shoe-art-walks-runway-at.html – I want these!

Bonham's Shoe Archive - Booktryst

Shopping:  Peacock P&P bag:  [can any Austen fan really live without this?!http://janeaustengiftshop.co.uk/acatalog/pride_and_prejudice_peacock_shopper_tote_bag.html

Peacock P&P boag - Jane Austen Centre

For fun:

World of Playing Cards website:  http://www.wopc.co.uk/

Handmade relica 17th c English playing cards - World of Playing Cards

The all-over-the-web “he said / she said” – literary quiz:  http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/06/24/he-said-she-said-literary-quiz

Have fun exploring!  Have you found anything of interest you would like to share? – please do!

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, at Jane Austen in Vermont
Austen Literary History & Criticism · Jane Austen · Literature · News

CFP: 200 Years of Sense & Sensibility ~ St. Andrews Conference

BookLady Deb2 Comments

I am posting this on behalf of the conference organizer:  please email her directly if you have questions.

CALL FOR PAPERS:  200 YEARS OF SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
a Two Day Conference
SCHOOL OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS,
9–10 SEPTEMBER 2011

Keynote speakers:

Kathryn Sutherland (St Anne’s College, Oxford) 

and

Paula Byrne (author of the new Harper Collins Jane Austen biography).

‘I am never too busy to think of S&S’, Jane Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra in April 1811. The year saw the publication of her first novel and to mark the anniversary, we are hosting a conference that reflects upon two hundred years of readership and opens up new interpretations of the novel. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers and round table panels on any aspect of the novel.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

  • Social and historical context
  • Reception
  • Tradition of Sensibility/contemporary aesthetic theory
  • Literary influences
  • Sibling relationships
  • Feminist readings
  • Adaptations and appropriations
  • Re-writings and sequels
  • The novel’s place in the canon

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to the conference organisers, Marina Cano López and Rose Pimentel, at 200sensibilities [at] gmail [dot] com

Please also email us with any questions at the above address. The deadline for proposals is 30 June 2011

For more information, please visit:

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/200sensibilities 

University of St. Andrews
Auctions · Jane Austen · Literature · News

On the Block! ~ Austen at Auction ~ Sotheby’s June 17, 2011 ~ P&P $35,000!

BookLady Deb3 Comments

UPDATE:  Results in red = Hammer price with Buyer’s Premium.

The results of today’s New York  Sotheby’s Sale No. NO8755: Fine Books and Manuscripts are in:  note the unsold items!

LOT 5

 

Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. London: T. Egerton, 1813
 SOLD for $35,000.  [estimate: 25,000—35,000 USD]

 LOT 50


Sense and Sensibility. London: Printed for the Author and published by T. Egerton, 1811  SOLD for $28,125.   [ est: 15,000—25,000 USD]

LOT 51

Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. London: T. Egerton, 1813
SOLD for $20,000.  [est: 10,000—15,000 USD]

 LOT 52

Mansfield Park.London: Printed for T. Egerton, 1814
SOLD for $5,625.  [ est: 6,000—8,000 USD]

 LOT 53

Emma: A Novel. London: Printed for John Murray, 1816
 UNSOLD [high bid $7,500] [est. 10,000—15,000 USD]

LOT 54

Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion. London, John Murray, 1818
 UNSOLD [high bid $4,250]  [est.  6,000—8,000 USD]

******************

The Brontes fared well today:  there were two lots of books by all three : Lot 55 sold for $80,500 [Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey]; Lot 56 sold for $33,750. [leather bound 1st editions of Emily, Charlotte and Anne, 17 volumes total]. 

Visit the Sotheby’s website for more details: browse the online catalogue here.

[Images and description text from the Sotheby’s catalogue]

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont 
Books · Jane Austen · Literature · News · Regency England · Social Life & Customs

The Penny Post Weekly Review ~ All Things Austen

BookLady Deb6 Comments

The Penny Post Weekly Review* 

June 4, 2011

News and Gossip: 

1.   “Josiah Wedgwood Tradesman – Tycoon, firing up the modern Age” at The Culture Concept Circle:  http://www.thecultureconcept.com/circle/josiah-wedgwood-tradesman-tycoon-firing-up-the-modern-age

 2.  http://www.e-enlightenment.com/ – free access through the month of June:   user ID: ee2011 / PW:  enlightenment

3.  How timely is this, as I just started to re-read Evelina last week! You can follow the Group read of Frances Burney’s Evelina at The Duchess of Devonshire’s Gossip Guide: here is the first post: http://georgianaduchessofdevonshire.blogspot.com/2011/06/evelina-volume-1-letters-1-20-and.html

The full reading schedule is here: join in if you can!http://georgianaduchessofdevonshire.blogspot.com/2011/05/evelina-group-read-rundown.html

  • 2 June: Volume 1 Letters 1-20
  • 9 June: Volume 1 Letter 21- Volume 2 Letter 6 (21-37)
  • 16 June: Volume 2 Letter 7- 22 (38-53)
  • 23 June: Volume 2 Letter 23- Volume 3 Letter 9 (54-71)
  • 30 June: Volume 3 Letter 10-23 (72-84)

4.  In the UK: The Jane Austen Regency Week [ June 18 – June 26, 2011], celebrating the time Jane Austen spent in Alton and Chawton, is sponsored by the Alton Chamber of Commerce – website with event information here: http://www.janeaustenregencyweek.co.uk/index.html

5.  As part of the above Regency Week celebration, the Chawton House Library will be hosting tea, talk, and tours on June 21st and 23rd : http://www.chawton.org/news/

6.  Two posts on the British and their lovely habit, the drinking of tea: at Mary Ellen Foley’s Anglo-American Experience blog:

Part 1: http://mefoley.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/tea-part-1/
Part 2: http://mefoley.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/tea-part-2/
Part 3: http://mefoley.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/tea-part-3/
Part 4:  coming soon, so check back

Chinese Flowers, Old Foley pottery, from M.E. Foley's blog

7.  Dressing the Part: Dolley Madison’s Life Through Fashion, an exhibit at James Madison’s Montpelier, June 15, 2011 – March 29, 2012: http://www.montpelier.org/explore/collections/dressing_the_part.php

8.  The In Fashion: High Style 1620-2011 exhibit at The Shelburne Museum opens June 18, 2011: http://shelburnemuseum.org/exhibitions/in-fashion/

9.  An interview with Diana Birchall at Maria Grazia’s The Jane Austen Book Club: [includes a book giveaway] http://thesecretunderstandingofthehearts.blogspot.com/2011/06/talking-jane-austen-with-diana-birchall.html

10.  I don’t even know where to begin re: V. S. Naipaul’s trashing women writers and Jane Austen’s “sentimentality” [see this article at the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/02/vs-naipaul-jane-austen-women-writers ]

– but as one gentleman on one of the listservs I subscribe to so eloquently said: “Oh yeah Naipaul, how many movies have been made from YOUR books, huh?”

**************************** 

New Books just out / about to be: 

1.  Why Jane Austen? By Rachel Brownstein. ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2011:  http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15390-4/why-jane-austen  [publication date: June 16, 2011 or thereabouts – more on this book next week!]

2.  Vauxhall Gardens, by David Coke and Alan Borg:  http://www.vauxhallgardens.com/ – the book is to be published by Yale University Press on June 8, 2011

3.  Jane Austen: Two Centuries of Criticism, by Laurence Mazzeno. Camden Press, 2011:

http://www.camden-house.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13605

***************************** 

A few blogs / websites to check out:

1.  This one deserves repeating:  The Jane Austen Music Transcripts Collection at Flinders Academic Commons, transcribed by Gillian Dooley [this is a wonderful resource, most all from Austen’s music manuscript notebooks]: http://dspace.flinders.edu.au/dspace/handle/2328/15193

2.  William Godwin’s Diary: Reconstructing a Social and Political Culture, 1788-1836:  http://godwindiary.politics.ox.ac.uk/   [husband to Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s father, Austen’s time]

3.  The Beau Monde Blog:  http://thebeaumondeworld.wordpress.com/

Beau Monde Blog header

4.  The Carlyle Letters Online:  http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/ [i.e Thomas and Jane]

5.  The George Eliot blog:  [new!]http://desperatelyseekinggeorge.wordpress.com/

6.  The Yale Center for British Art – their fabulous new website:  http://britishart.yale.edu/

Mercier - 'The Sense of Hearing' - detail - YCBA

 *****************************

* I hope to return to doing a weekly update of various Austen-related discoveries – so much out there – so little time – one must set aside some time for BOOKS, don’t you think??

Copyright @2011 Deb Barnum, at Jane Austen in Vermont
Books · Jane Austen · Literature

Follow Friday ~ The Westminster Detective Library

BookLady DebLeave a comment

Murder will out …. Taking a slight detour from the usual Jane Austen and Regency Period fare here at Jane Austen in Vermont, I shall alert you today to the website The Westminster Detective Library. 

Hosted by McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland:

It is the mission of the Westminster Detective Library to catalog and make available online all the short fiction dealing with detectives and detection published in the United States before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891).

We have posted our working bibliography and will add full-text copy of its entries as we prepare them. We welcome comments and solicit both additional bibliographical entries and texts.

Editors:
LeRoy Lad Panek
Mary M. Bendel-Simso
-McDaniel College

A work in progress, the site offers a short tales by Dickens, Poe, Wilkie Collins, and a good number of more obscure writers, the first story from 1834,  “A Story of Circumstantial Evidence” by Daniel O’Connell.  You can access the stories from the Bibliography, where you can browse by title, author, or chronologically.  Stories are formatted as they may have originally appeared in a journal or newspaper, but the handy “printer-friendly” button allows the more modern full-screen view you may print out for bed-time reading, the best place for any and all detective fiction.

As murder seems to be on my mind [more on my escape from the elegant Regency to the dark side of Victorian London with a visit to the Sherlock Holmes Museum in a future post], I point you to a new work on just this subject: murder in Victorian Britain.  Judith Flanders, author of the very enjoyable informative work The Victorian Home, as well as Consuming Passions, and A Circle of Sisters, has just published The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime:

 

In the nineteenth century, murder – a rarity in reality – was ubiquitous in novels, in broadsides and ballads, in theatre and melodrama and opera – even in puppet shows and performing dog-acts. As Punch wrote, ‘We are a trading community, a commercial people. Murder is doubtless a very shocking offence, nevertheless as what is done is not to be undone, let us make our money out of it.’

In this meticulously researched and compellingly written exploration of a century of murder, Judith Flanders examines some of the most gripping and gruesome cases, the famous and the obscure, the brutal and the pathetic – to build a rich and multi-faceted portrait of Victorian society. The Invention of Murder is both a gripping tale of crime and punishment, and history at its most readable.

‘Dare I say it would be a crime not to read this book?’  – Donna Leon

[Image and text from Judith Flanders website]

And so as I now appear to be obsessed with murder, I also remind you of the running of the Agatha Christie murder mysteries on Masterpiece Theatre – beginning this past Sunday with “Murder on the Orient Express“.  This PBS summer series includes: (online viewing dates in parentheses following the national broadcast date)

  • May 22 (May 23 – Jun 5) Poirot: “Murder on the Orient Express” (Encore)
  • (May 23 – Jun 21) “David Suchet on the Orient Express: A Masterpiece Special” 60 min. (Encore)*
  • May 29 (May 30 – Jun 12) Marple: “The Secret of Chimneys” (Encore)*
  • Jun 5 (Jun 6 – Jun 19) Poirot: “Appointment with Death” (Encore)*
  • Jun 12 (Jun 13 – Jun 26) Poirot: “The Third Girl” (Encore)*
  • Jun 19 (Jun 20 – Jul 19) Poirot: “Three Act Tragedy”
  • Jun 26 (Jun 27 – Jul 26) Poirot: “The Clocks”
  • Jul 3 (Jul 4 – Aug 2) Poirot: “The Hallowe’en Party”
  • Jul 10 (Jul 11 – Aug 9) Marple: “The Pale Horse 

Enjoy!

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum at Jane Austen in Vermont 
Austen Literary History & Criticism · Books · Jane Austen · Literature · Publishing History · Rare Books

Austen on the Block! ~ Sotheby’s June 17, 2011

BookLady Deb1 Comment

The exciting news this past week on the impending sale of the manuscript pages of Jane  Austen’s The Watsons certainly sent most us into a mild depression about how unattainable such a piece is for most of us. But today, Sotheby’s has made its New York June 17th auction of Fine Books and Manuscripts available online, and I see there are several Austen titles up for sale, still perhaps unattainable for most of us, but a little more reasonable just the same… again, one can only lament how Austen struggled to earn a pittance for her labors, and how Cassandra sold all the copyrights believing that her sister’s popularity had crested as she sank rather rapidly into obscurity!  Aah! Hindsight!

Here are the six lots for sale ~ you can go to the Sotheby’s website for more information on these lots and how to bid online:   

 Sotheby’s Sale No. NO8755: Fine Books and Manuscripts

LOT 5

Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. London: T. Egerton, 1813

3 volumes, 12mo (6 3/4 x 4 in.; 170 x 100 mm). Half-titles; light, scattered staining in all 3 vols. but withal a clean copy, a few short marginal tears in vol. 1, oxidized catchword in 1:O8, paper creased in lower right corner of 2:F1 and so printed. Contemporary mottled calf, smooth spines with gilt rules resembling chained links; spine labels lacking on vols. 1–2, vol. 1 boards detached, joints starting on vols. 2–3, craquelure on spines, minor loss to head of spine of vol. 3.   25,000—35,000 USD

 LOT 50


Sense and Sensibility. London: Printed for the Author and published by T. Egerton, 1811 

3 volumes, 12mo (6 3/8 x 3 7/8 in.; 161 x 98 mm). Lacks half-title in vol. 1 and terminal blanks in all 3 vols., half-title guarded in vol. 3, strong offsetting from morocco library label in vol. 1 to title-page, washed and pressed with residual foxing and staining throughout vol. 1, quires A–F in vol. 2, and quire B in vol. 3. Sympathetically bound in half mottled calf antique over marbled boards, spines in 6 compartments, russet and black lettering and numbering pieces, plain endpapers, edges uniformly marbled with boards.  15,000—25,000 USD

LOT 51

Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. London: T. Egerton, 1813

3 volumes, 12mo (6 3/4 x 4 1/16 in.; 170 x 104 mm). Lacks all half-titles, washed and pressed with residual staining and browning but less pronounced in vols. 2–3, strong offsetting from morocco label and binding to title-page and B1 in vol. 1, offsetting from binding to title-pages and terminal leaves in vols 2–3, short tears to inside lower left corners in vol. 1, quire B. Modern half black calf over marbled boards, spines in 6 compartments, red morocco labels, endpapers and edges plain.  10,000—15,000 USD

 LOT 52

Mansfield Park.London: Printed for T. Egerton, 1814

3 volumes, 12mo (7 x 4 in.; 175 x 100 mm). Lacking final blanks in vols. 2–3 and all 3 half-titles, long tears at 1:P12 costing at least 4 words, quire 1:Q loose, long tear in 2:C1 touching 5 lines, small perforations in gutters of 3:C3–6, title-page tipped in vol. 3, occasional light staining, chiefly marginal, a few short tears. Modern brown buckram, black morocco spine labels, plain endpapers and edges.  6,000—8,000 USD

 LOT 53

Emma: A Novel. London: Printed for John Murray, 1816

3 volumes, 12mo (6 3/4 x 4 1/8 in.; 170 x 104 mm). Half-titles; washed and pressed with some residual foxing and staining, particularly to half-titles, short split to vol. 1 half-title near gutter. Half mottled calf, marbled boards, spines in 6 compartments (2 reserved for lettering pieces), the others ornamented with gilt marguerites and floral cornerpieces, plain endpapers, top edges gilt; joints and spine ends a trifle rubbed, endpapers renewed. Blue holland paper slipcase; faded and stained.  10,000—15,000 USD

LOT 54

Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion. London, John Murray, 1818

4 volumes, 12mo (6 3/4 x 4 1/8 in.; 170 x 104 mm). Lacking half-titles in vols. 2–4 and blanks P7,8 in vol. 4 called for by Gilson, marginal offsetting to title-pages from bindings, washed and pressed with some residual toning and foxing. Uniformly bound with Emma (see previous lot); joints rubbed. Blue holland paper slipcase; faded and stained.   6,000—8,000 USD

Go in and browse the online catalogue – there are amazing items in this sale: Dickens, Bronte, Dickinson, Beatrix Potter and Arthur Rackham, Steinbeck letters,  Mark Twain, and so much more !

[Images and description text from the Sotheby’s catalogue]

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont 
Jane Austen · Literature · London

In Search of Austen in London ~ Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

BookLady Deb4 Comments

[Image: Wikipedia]

A visit to the Globe Theatre in Southwark is an essential stop in London.  Close to its original site, re-built through the efforts of Sam Wanamaker, the Globe had its official opening season in June 1997.  Tours are conducted year-round and the museum housing the Globe Exhibition is a must-see – I have taken this tour a few times but have never been in London during the show season, usually late April to early October [  click here for this year’s offerings ] – so I was thrilled this trip to finally see a performance, and a play I have neither read nor seen:  All’s Well That Ends Well!

London 1611, John Speed map. Genmaps.

 

The best way to get there is to walk across the Millenium Bridge:

Millenium Bridge from the Globe – 2010 rainy visit!
Globe Stage

We had fabulous seats, front row of the first balcony with the railing to lean on, looking down onto the stage and the lowly “pit-dwellers” [and cautioned to NOT drape anything or hold drinks over the rail for fear of droppings on the standing-room only crowd below] – and one piece of advice – either bring your own or rent a cushion – offered for £1 and worth every pence!]

The Seats! - the Globe Tour, Feb 2010, hence the coats

What an experience! – transported back into Shakespeare’s day –
the language, the costumes, the comedy! Though there was no such
Globe Theatre during Austen’s day, Shakespeare was produced in the
theatres and Austen was a regular theatre-goer when visiting Henry
and Eliza in London. Austen and Shakespeare is, however, book not
blog post material! – there are numerous allusions to Shakespeare in
her letters and writings [ Richard III, Macbeth, King John, Hamlet,
Henry IV, The Merchant of Venice for starters…], but as heard in this
dialogue between Henry Crawford and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park,
we can perhaps get a sense of Austen’s true feelings about Shakespeare:

 Crawford: “… I do not think I have had a volume of Shakespeare in my hand before since I was fifteen. I once saw Henry the Eighth acted, or I have heard of it from somebody who did, I am not certain which. But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.”

And Edmund replies:  “No doubt one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions; but this is totally distinct from giving his sense as you gave it. To know him in bits and scraps is common enough; to know him pretty thoroughly is, perhaps, not uncommon; but to read him well aloud is no everyday talent.”

[Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 3, p. 338]

But back to All’s Well That Ends Well:  I turn to my trusty Shakespeare
text from college [we were using the G. B. Harrison text of 1952 in 1967!
yikes!] – now, I confess, quite torn and tattered, one of the few books I vigorously attacked with marginalia and underlining – but alas!, AWTEW remains pristine, a glaring anomaly, and I wonder what my professor had against this play?!  This must be one of Shakespeare’s duds – a comedy
without humor, a romance without a hero.  Indeed, this textbook says
[dated though it is!): 

“The play seems never to have been popular. Scholars have found no contemporary mention of quotation.  There is, therefore, no external fact by which the date of writing can be determined, nor is there any topical allusion or other clue within the play itself.  The style is uneven, but in the best passages, both verse and prose, there is a maturity which shows that the play was written in the latter half of Shakespeare’s career…. [thus] a date is assigned somewhere between 1601 and 1604.” [Harrison, p. 1018.]  It first appeared in print in the First Folio of 1623, after Shakespeare’s death in 1616.

First Folio - AWTEW - Wikipedia

 

Its original source was from Boccaccio’s Decameron, likely from William Painter’s collection of Italianate tales, The Palace of Pleasure (1566), Shakespeare following the tale of Giglietta de Narbone and Beltram de Rossiglione quite closely, with his usual added subplots of fools and
braggarts. 

Basic story:  Bertram, a young Count whose father has just died, leaves
home to attend the Court of the ailing King of France.  Bertram bids adieu
to his mother, the delightful Countess* of Roussillon, and her ward, Helena,
the daughter of a well-respected physician. Helena is in love with Bertram,
but as she is of a lower class, her affection is not, cannot be reciprocated [though Bertram does carry Helena’s handkerchief with him for the entire play, all the while eschewing her love].  Conveniently the King of France is dying; Helena offers to cure him with the knowledge she has learned from her father; her prize if she is successful to choose a husband from his courtiers; the Countess sends her off to Paris, and the fun begins.

The King is cured, Helena chooses Bertram [the selection process is very funny!], he declines due to her low social status [he is a man on the way UP],
the King insists, they marry, and Bertram sends her home without a wedding night. He then heads off to war in Italy to make a name for himself, writing Helena that he will remain her husband in name only unless she can get the
ring from his finger and prove she is pregnant with his child [difficult with no wedding night…].  Helena leaves immediately for Italy, with full approval of
her now mother-in-law The Countess who loves her as a true daughter, and she discovers Bertram making merry with the young Italian lasses, one in particular named Diana.  Helena tells her tale of woe to Diana and her mother and they agree to the infamous “bed-trick” whereby Helena will secretly appear to Bertram as his lover Diana – she requests his ring, she, or course, is left with child, her identity is revealed, Bertram confesses his true love after all, and as the saying goes, “all’s well that ends well”!  [This very brief summary gives
short shift to the subplot of Bertram’s right-hand man, Parolles, a coward and
a traitor, blindly followed by Bertram until his true colors are revealed – and
all up to humorous par with Shakespeare’s other such braggarts.]

Helena (Ellie Piercy) & Bertram (Sam Crane) - Globe website

The play has been rarely acted, and has no glowing reviews, as the following example of Samuel Johnson attests:

 The play has many delightful scenes, though not sufficiently probable, and some happy characters, though not new, nor produced by any deep knowledge of human nature. …I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram, a man noble without generosity, and young without truth, who marries Helen [sic] as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate; when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.

[Samuel Johnson, Notes on the Plays of Shakespeare, 1765] –
in Harrison, p. 1019.

But enjoyable it was, despite the hero being a bit of a jerk [does “Bertram’
have a familiar ring as a hero sorely lacking??!] – he does every thing to hurt Helena, is obsessed with his social status, chooses friends who are scoundrels, whines, whines and whines again,  lies his way into the beds of maidens, and in the last five minutes, is, as Johnson says, “dismissed to happiness.”

But who needs a dashing romantic hero when one has The Globe in one’s periphery and a play with much lively wit in prose and verse [the King’s
timely “I am wrapped in dismal thinkings” nearly brought the roof down, though alas! no roof in sight! – I shall now use this phrase repeatedly and annoy all my friends!], and it all ends with a lengthy round of dancing – all characters participating in the raucous festivities where one is finally able to see Bertram as a more lively and affectionate lover.  My traveling companion and I agreed – all plays should end in such a way! [we later in the week saw Wicked and were much disappointed that the characters came out only for a bow and did not break into ten minutes of dancing!]

Musicians for AWTEW

 

* an Austen 6 degrees of separation stretch but worthy of note!:

The Countess is played by Janie Dee, who is also cast as Adam Dalgliesh’s lovely Emma in P. D. James’s Death in Holy Orders and The Murder Room – Emma of course being the perfect mate for her Austen-loving detective and recipient of a very Wentworth–worthy letter of Dalgliesh’s professed love!

Helena and the Countess (Janie Dee) - The Telegraph

A side note:  the program guide is worth the price of admission! – with a short history of the Globe, Shakespeare in London, the background and history of the play to include its contemporary contexts all with pictures, photographs of the actors in rehearsal, extensive biographies of the cast, excellent ads, and the latest news at The Globe, a very exciting bit being the new indoor Jacobean Theatre which will allow winter performances.  Hurray! 

If you are in London this season, I can only emphatically say, get thee hence to The Globe! – this season’s offerings besides AWTEW are Hamlet, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Doctor Faustus, Anne Boleyn, The Globe Mysteries, and The God of Soho – see the link here for more information.   

From The Globe Exhibition:

Elizabeth I dress
 

FurtherReading: [a very brief smattering of Shakespeare] 

[All photographs by Deb Barnum, @2010 and @2011 unless otherwise noted]

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont 
Austen Literary History & Criticism · Jane Austen · Literature · News · Rare Books

On the Block! ~ Jane Austen’s The Watson’s

BookLady Deb3 Comments

Breaking news from The Guardian:  [and now all over the blogsphere!]

Jane Austen rare manuscript
up for sale

A rare, handwritten manuscript of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons is to be sold at auction at Sotheby’s in London.

by Mark Brown, The Guardian, May 20, 2011

An incredibly rare handwritten manuscript of an unfinished novel by Jane Austen – the only one that is still in private hands – is to appear at auction inLondon.

The neatly written but heavily corrected pages are for her unfinished work The Watsons, a novel which many believe could easily have been as good as her six completed works.

Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s senior specialist in books and manuscripts, said it was “a thrill and privilege” to be selling it: “It is very exciting. This is the most significant Austen material to come on the market since the late 1980s.”

It is unquestionably rare. Original manuscripts of her published novels do not exist, aside from two cancelled chapters of Persuasion in the British Library.

The novel is considered around a quarter completed and the manuscript has 68 pages – hand-trimmed by Austen – which have been split up into 11 booklets.

It is most but not all of Austen’s unfinished novel. The first 12 pages were sold by an Austen descendent during the first world war to help the Red Cross and are now in New York’s Pierpont Morgan Library, while the next few pages were inexplicably lost by Queen Mary, University of London which has been looking after the manuscript.

The college’s director of library services Emma Bull said it happened six years ago, before she arrived, and had resulted in a full investigation which, alas, “did not really come to any firm conclusions about what specifically happened.” There had been a hope that they would turn up, but clearly that is now highly unlikely.

The Watsons manuscript shows how Austen’s other manuscripts must have looked. It also shines an interesting light on how she worked. Austen took a piece of paper, cut it in two and then folded over each half to make eight-page booklets. Then she would write, small neat handwriting leaving little room for corrections – of which there are many. “You can really see the mind at work with all the corrections and revisions,” said Heaton.

Scene from Pride & Prejudice, by Isabel Bishop - Morgan Library

At one stage she crosses so much out that she starts a page again and pins it in. It seems, in Austen’s mind, her manuscript had to look like a book. “Writers often fall into two categories,” said Heaton. “The ones who fall into a moment of great inspiration and that’s it and then you have others who endlessly go back and write and tinker. Austen is clearly of the latter variety. It really is a wonderful, evocative document.”

The Watsons was written in 1804, not a hugely happy time for Austen professionally – she had one novel rejected and another bought by a publisher who failed to print it.

It was also a difficult time personally and one reason it was not finished may be because fact came too close to the fiction. The Watsons heroine is Emma, one of four sisters who are daughters of a sick and widowed clergyman. The novel would have had the father die leaving Emma in a precarious financial position. In real life, Austen’s clergyman father died leaving her in a similar pickle to her fictional heroine.

Had Austen completed The Watsons there are many who believe it would have been a classic. Margaret Drabble described it as “a tantalising, delightful and highly accomplished fragment, which must surely have proved the equal of her other six novels, had she finished it.”

The manuscript was bought by the present owner in 1988 when it was sold by the British Rail Pension Fund. It had been bought from Austen descendents in the 1970s when manuscripts, rare books and fine art seemed like perfectly sensible things for nationalised pension funds to buy.

The manuscript has been valued at £200,000 to £300,000 and will be sold at Sotheby’s in London on 14 July.

You can see this page from The Watsons at the Pierpont Morgan Library’s online exhibition A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy:

[Image:  The Watsons,  Pierpont Morgan Library Online Exhibition]

The Sotheby’s auction page is here, English Literature & History, Sale No. L11404, though there are no details yet online.  I will keep you posted! – and more on The Watsons in the coming weeks… you can read it online here at The Republic of Pemberley or a PDF version here,  or learn more about it here at Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts where you can also read along with the digitized copy.

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont