Further Reading: Second Impressions
February 15, 2012
Knowing little of the person but what I read in The New York Times, Sandy Lerner, as an idea, has long fascinated me, to the extent that she inspired a minor character in The Jane Austen Project, an ancient Ph.D. mathematician and tech billionaire with an obsession with literature, thought to be bankrolling the Jane Austen Project. When it turned out that Ms. Lerner (who for the record is neither ancient nor a Ph.D.) was giving a talk at my own local Jane Austen Society chapter, on a night that I already had off, no less, that I would be going to hear her was obvious.
I don’t know what I expected, except that it was certain to be interesting. It was that, and much more. Ms. Lerner, it turns out, has written a novel, having spent 26 years researching an historically accurate sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Read the rest of this entry »
Further Reading, Part II
December 8, 2011
Whose Jane Austen?
It’s a question I’ve often asked myself while researching and writing The Jane Austen Project, but never more insistently than when considering the works that make up the short story anthology “Jane Austen Made Me Do It, Original Stories Inspired by Literature’s Most Astute Observer of the Human Heart.” I use the subtitle advisedly, for this is one way of viewing Jane Austen, and perhaps a message from its editor, Laurel Ann Nattress of Austenprose, of how she, at least, does.
JAMMDI is on one hand a brilliant marketing idea, combining the brand recognition of Jane Austen with some of the biggest names in Austen and Austenesque fan fiction. But ideally it is more than that, being also an effort to wrestle with the question of what Jane Austen means to people living today, nearly 200 years after her death. Read the rest of this entry »
Further Reading: Jane Austen Made Me Do It, Part I
October 27, 2011
I have mixed feelings about much of the contemporary fiction inspired by Jane Austen, despite or perhaps because of my own efforts to write some myself. The work, and I include my own in this comment, often disappoints. Perhaps, like Marianne Dashwood, “I require so much!” Or perhaps the problem is inherent in inviting comparison with one of the wittiest writers to ever pick up a pen; one’s efforts can hardly avoid seeming pallid by contrast. It fails to be Jane Austen, as most everything does.
Despite the perils, people keep doing it, drawn like moths to a flame: writing sequels and prequels, imagining Jane Austen as a vampire, a sleuth or a con artist who fakes her death at age 41 and runs away, disguised as a man, to start a theater troupe, for which she writes all the plays, that tours the young nation of America. Actually, I made that last bit up. Nobody has written that book, which is not to say nobody ever will.
What makes them (us) do it? I suppose there are as many reasons as there are retellings of “Pride and Prejudice” through Mr. Darcy’s eyes: simple homage, awareness that there is an already created fan base, the same spirit of fun that impelled the teenage Jane Austen to mock the fictional conventions of the late 18th century. Then, too, there is the desire to fill in the unknown bits, and a large element of wish fulfillment. If reading a story is a way to indulge one’s fantasy of being or having what one is not or lacks in real life, then writing one is even more so.
And perhaps the strongest wish of all is to somehow be closer to Jane Austen, to connect with her spirit, her genius. The same spirit animating the women who sew their own Regency outfits and then model them on YouTube videos inspires others, more adept with a keyboard than with a needle, to write fan fiction. Jane Austen Made Me Do It! one can imagine them explaining with a shrug. Read the rest of this entry »
The End in Sight
November 28, 2010
I can see that the ending of “The Jane Austen Project” will take everything I have and then some. Everything I know about Rachel and Liam and their situation, and everything I know about Jane Austen. Everything in fact that I know about novels, and about life up to this point. But it is not primarily a matter of knowing; it comes from some deeper place than that.
And when I write a paragraph like that, and read it back over, I wonder: Am I making too much of this? Am I making it sound harder than it really is?
No.
I just read a magnificent ending. Indeed, the whole book was great. It fills me with joy to know that Jonathan Franzen is alive and among us, apparently in good health and capable of writing many more books like Freedom. I began to fall in love with this book on Page 4, when he described his main female character, Patty, then in her early 20s and part of a newly gentrifying St. Paul neighborhood, in this way:
Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her days in the string bags that hung from her stroller. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was starting to happen to the rest of the street.
It’s so amazing. Where do I start? The pitch-perfect detail, rich but just short of being over the top. The Silver Palate Cookbook. Public radio. Latex paint. Zinfandel! The risk of locating a character so precisely, of course, is that readers of a future generation (and I have no doubt there will be such readers) will need footnotes. They will get it, but not entirely. But the real triumph is the move from the particular to the general to the universal. She was already fully the thing that was happening to the rest of the street. At this point, she might be just a stereotypical yuppie of a certain place and time; the point of view in this section, which is very cleverly done, seems to be a sort of Greek chorus of the neighbors, everyone and no one in particular,and to this narrator, Patty is clearly an enigma. As her mystery is revealed to the reader, slowly, over 562 pages, the stakes keep getting higher. For the characters, of course, but even more so for the writer. How to tie up a story with so many complex elements? How will he possibly resolve all this in a way that is both inevitable and surprising?
The good news is he does, magnificently. Reading this book gives me hope in endings, life, the future, and the future of the novel. And it gave me one important lesson: while it might be hard to write a good ending, it is not impossible.
Illicit Reading, Continued
September 24, 2010
The obit pages are an important source of leads for great yet undeservedly obscure books. That was where I learned of The Tortoise and the Hare by the recently deceased Elizabeth Jenkins, whom I already knew of as the author of a wonderful, though hard to find, biography of Jane Austen. I finished reading The Tortoise and the Hare last night, rather too late, and am still under its spell. Such a book should not be forgotten, yet it largely is.
What made it at once so much fun to read and so satisfying as a work of art? The sly humor, the use of telling detail, and the aptness of the social observation, though it describes a world that is both unfamiliar to me and long vanished (English, upper-middle class, late 1940s or early 50s) The subtle way the story is told. The ending. Especially, the ending. It is a truly magnificent ending, which surprised me, for all along, though I was enjoying the journey the book was taking me on, I kept feeling the structure — the plot — was odd. Unusual. Where was she going with this?
The novel tells the story of about a year in the life of Imogen, a sensitive and attractive woman of 37, married to Evelyn, a successful lawyer 15 years older, and her gradually dawning horror and despair as she realizes she is losing her husband to an unlikely rival: a never-married, badly dressed, unattractive neighbor, Blanche, age 50. Blanche is decisive, generous, practical and rich. Unlike Imogen, she enjoys fishing, hunting and outings to the race track. She is everything Imogen is not, and Imogen’s self-confidence, never strong to start with, slowly wilts as she moves from vague discontent to suspicion, then to fear, then to certainty that Blanche has become her husband’s mistress. The couple’s one child, Gavin, is a copy of his father, and his contemptuous treatment of Imogen is a humorous foil for the more subtle cruelty meted out by Evelyn. Only Gavin’s friend, Tim Leeper, who becomes a fixture in the household as a refuge from his own chaotic home (the scenes at the Leepers’ are among the broadest and most amusing in the book), seems to have any admiration for Imogen and her quiet virtues.
The book’s narrative structure is odd, because nearly the entire novel is taken up with the gradual crushing of Imogen. She is passive, inert, completely under the spell of her charismatic and adored husband even as she realizes she is losing him. A woman from another era, she has defined herself completely in the role of wife and mother, only to find she has failed at both. Her despair is nearly total, yet the flashes of wit and beauty keep the story from becoming too depressing. And yet as I kept reading, I kept asking myself, what is she going to DO? And when is she going to do it? The structure of a novel demands conflict and resolution — a character resisting, in some fashion, the mess she has been presented with. And yet Imogen seems powerless to do anything. Until, finally, she does.
To describe the ending would not be to spoil it — there is no shocking development, nothing that does not grow organically out of character and situation — yet it would also not do it justice. All along, the author has skillfully kept the reader just a few steps ahead of Imogen, so we see what she does not yet, the utter ruin of her marriage. And this technique succeeds brilliantly in the end, for we are taken exactly to the point — and no farther — where we realize that Imogen is going to be all right, even though she does not yet fully understand that. That she has, in fact, escaped a kind of living death, the illusion of happiness with a selfish, cruel husband, and whatever her life is going to be going forward is going to be hers, founded in reality. But the author does not explain any of this as baldly as I have just done; she does not need to. The story tells us everything we need, and no more.
Austen Homages
August 20, 2010
To write any novel invoking the name or spirit of Jane Austen is to ask for trouble, by inviting unflattering comparisons with one of the greatest novelists of her age (or indeed of any age). Few can stand up to the comparison. The Jane Austen Book Club does. So, I am happy to report, does The Three Weissmanns of Westport, which I started with apprehension and finished with steadily mounting delight.
The apprehension was at the notion of what Cathleen Schine had, according to the reviews, undertaken in this book: a modern retelling of Sense and Sensibility. How many ways are there to screw that up? Too many to count. But my delight grew as I kept reading, because there is a sense of joyful mystery in reading a novelist who is firing on all cylinders, writing at the height of her powers (actually, since this is the first book by Ms. Schine that I have read, I can’t really say that. Maybe her other books are even better, and I hope to determine that soon. The one about dogs looks especially promising. But it’s hard to imagine this particular book being any better than it was, and that is not something I think that often).
Why did it work so well? That was what I kept trying to figure out afterward, and it was kind of hard. Books that don’t work are often more instructive than those that do. With the successful ones, the seams don’t show. Also, novels that work seem to lull one into a happy stupor, putting the critical faculties to sleep, so later it is hard to be analytical.
First, it succeeds on a micro level because the writing, at the sentence and paragraph level, is good. By good, I mean, it does not draw attention itself by being either clumsy or excessively mannered. The prose struck me initially as workmanlike, uncliched, a thing that is rarer than it should be. Then I began to gradually find the writing not just satisfactory, but actually rather lovely, though again in a nonshowy way. Also, funny. The humor sneaks up on the reader, not unlike Jane Austen’s in that that respect, though the jokes are quite different.
The book succeeds on more macro levels, too. The plot works because the author is not afraid to have nothing in particular happen for rather long periods of time; again, the mark of a writer who knows what she’s doing, who recognizes that plot is not just the piling on of incidents, but the reflection on what those incidents mean, the accretion of time changing the characters’ understanding of what is going on. The plot, one might object, is stolen from Jane Austen; but that is not strictly true. What is so delightful about The Three Weissmans is how the author uses the skeleton of Sense and Sensibility but adapts it to her own story’s needs. The characters and situations are recognizable and yet transfigured — cleverly, but never simply to show off the author’s cleverness. They resonate with the spirit of Jane Austen, but they also offer a witty commentary on contemporary life. It is almost as if Sense and Sensibility and The Three Weissmans are nodding to each other across the chasm of the 200 years and the wide ocean that separates them: with understanding and compassion, but also with a smile. Because what it is, first and last, is funny.
Now I am reading Murder at Mansfield Park by Lynn Shepherd. I wanted to like this, but I am finding it hard going. I love Mansfield Park, and I love murder mysteries. Ms. Shepherd has a Ph.D. in English literature from Oxford, and it shows. Her command of the vocabulary of the Austen era is pitch-perfect. She also scatters learned references throughout, lifting entire sentences and paragraphs not just from MP but from the other novels, as well as from the letters and from Austen biography. “The heat keeps me in a continual state of inelegance,” one character remarks in a line straight from a letter. “Indeed, she is quite the vainest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly I have ever had the misfortune to encounter,” Mrs. Norris says of Mary Crawford, a remark in real life supposedly made about Jane Austen as a young woman by the mother of Mary Russell Mitford (though whether she actually knew her, or just later claimed to have, is open to some doubt).
The characters in Ms. Shepherd’s alternative Mansfield Park are jumbled like dice in a box. Most notably, Fanny Price, still a cousin of the Betrams, is now orphaned, fabulously rich, and insufferable. Mary Crawford is poor and worthy. Henry Crawford is a renovator of estates, rather like Repton. Julia Betram is sensitive and romantic and neglected, and vaguely like the two younger Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility. Edmund, for some reason, is now the son and heir of Mrs. Norris, who is much like the original Mrs. Norris, except richer and more obnoxious; he seems to have cross-pollinated with Edward Ferrars from Sense and Sensbility. Everyone expects he and his cousin Fanny to marry and keep the wealth in the family. Maria Betram is rather like herself, and so is Tom Betram. Mr. Rushworth is still rich but no longer stupid.
I fancy I know Mansfield Park as well as the next person, having reread it only two months ago, but I find myself getting confused between the elements that overlap and those that don’t. In the first half of the book (as much as I’ve read so far) many of the same scenes and elements crop up — the trip to Sotherton, Lover’s Vows, the necklace, the ball, the game of Speculation, Sir Thomas Betram’s departure (he merely goes to Yorkshire, not Antigua), the departure of a beloved brother to sea (it’s Julia who pines for him, not Fanny).
Incident rapidly succeeds incident, but I can’t seem to answer the essential questions. Why has the author changed some things so utterly and left others the same? Where is she going with this? In theory it ought to be funny and ironic, winkingly postmodern, but for some reason I am not laughing. I think I am working too hard on figuring out what I am supposed to be paying attention to. It is undoubtedly a sincere homage. But why isn’t it working for me?
Illicit Reading
July 28, 2010
Inspired by Colm Toibin’s review of a new biography, I am now rereading a book that doesn’t fall into my list of TJAP-approved reading, but maybe it should: Howards End.
Perhaps E.M. Forster has the truest claim to be Jane Austen’s spiritual heir, not Henry James or Edith Wharton or Virginia Woolf, those who are in some ways more obvious contenders to the title. It strikes me reading this novel now in 2010 that I am as far away in time from the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes and London in the early years of the 20th century as Forster was from the Dashwoods and the Middletons and London in the early years of the 19th. Their world seems distant and yet entirely familiar; but then, so does Jane Austen’s. And perhaps this is the thread that links the two: an interest in eternal and timeless human truths, as expressed in simple, outwardly rather unexciting, daily events. Forster, like Austen, was interested in how money lay at the root of many aspects of life, in how people got along, found meaning and found love. But these comments are so general that they could describe a lot of novels; what is it, actually, that links the two, the clergyman’s spinster daughter and the closeted gay man? Intelligence, obviously, and irony. A kind of imaginative sympathy.
Reading Forster, you feel certain you would have liked him if you could have met him, and yet I search for the source of this certainty without success. There is a kindness that seems to hover around his paragraphs, as if he was writing with a smile, feeling affection for even his most annoying characters. However, I am not sure this is also true of Jane Austen; the part about the smile, maybe. To me she seems never bitter, never hateful, as some critics have affirmed. But she can be merciless! One thinks of the Eltons, or Lady Catherine, or Elizabeth Elliot.
I have read Howards End…how many times? I don’t remember. I know I first read it 20 years ago, in Hong Kong, finding a paperback Penguin version in a used bookstore on Hollywood Road. ”J. Dunkerley, Q.A.S. Sept 76″ is inscribed in the front, so this particular copy already had a history then. I wrote my own name on the same page, the year, the place. English-language books were expensive and hard to come by, and I held on to this one as the treasure it was. J. Dunkerley, perhaps reading this for a class, made many notes in the margins, which seem insightful when they are legible, which is not often.
Whenever I reread Howards End, it is always with a feeling of surprise, as if some part of my mind is reading it for the very first time. I do not seem to bring the earlier readings along with me as ballast and contrast, as is true for some other chronically reread books (Unbearable Lightness of Being, Anna Karenina). Perhaps because it isn’t the plot that sticks with one so much, as the way the writing seduces the reader despite all the odds. Mrs. Wilcox, for instance. How did he do that? There seems nothing to her, and yet she anchors the book.
She was not intellectual, nor even alert, and it was odd that, all the same, she should give the idea of greatness. Margaret, zigzagging with her friends over Thought and Art, was conscious of a personality that transcended their own and dwarfed their activities. There was no bitterness in Mrs. Wilcox; there was not even criticism; she was lovable, and no ungracious or uncharitable word had passed her lips. Yet she and daily life were out of focus: one or the other must show blurred. And at lunch she seemed more out of focus than usual, and nearer the line that divides daily life from a life that may be of greater importance.
I Write Like Jane Austen!
July 14, 2010
That’s according to this analysis tool, which also found, according to her own Twitter feeds, that Margaret Atwood writes like Stephen King (or was it James Joyce?) so I receive this good news with a qualified enthusiasm. Surely Margaret Atwood should write like, well, Margaret Atwood? Isn’t she famous enough to be in the database that analyzes prose? If she is not, who is?
Right now I am nearly done reading Camilla by Fanny Burney, and what a strange, hot mess that is. Better than Evelina, in the sense of being more richly crowded with people and incident, a more fully realized work. It looks forward to the overstuffed Victorian novels of Dickens and Eliot, in its sentimentality and its extremes. But it also shows the stamp of earlier 18th-century novels, especially Tom Jones, Clarissa and The Vicar of Wakefield, in its sweeping authorial asides and moral lessons. Still, the sense that strikes me most strongly reading this book is what a raw deal women got in this world, and how the author hardly seems to remark on this, as if it is something too obvious to require comment.
The plot of Camilla, if I dare to describe such a thing, centers on the title character, a girl of 17 when the main action of the plot begins. She is one of three daughters in what is presented as a nearly perfect family: a kind, intelligent clergyman father, a mother who is even more intelligent and respected (though who is for most of the action of the story on urgent business on the Continent, thus depriving Camilla of her counsel when it is most needed). Camilla is all unaffected goodness and generosity, though with an impulsiveness that leads her into trouble. Since childhood she has loved, and been adored by, the rich and handsome boy next door (next estate, actually) an equally kind but more rigidly righteous person with the improbable name of Edgar Mandlebert (Burney has a weakness for crazy names.) Through a series of absurd misunderstandings that could have been cleared up in a single honest conversation, which they somehow seem never able to have, they become ever more estranged, as Camilla embarks on a round of pleasure outings in Tunbridge Wells, Southhampton and London that bring her decreasing pleasure, and an officious hanger-on with the unlikely name of Mrs. Mittin leads her unwittingly deep into debt.
The novel is fascinating in how it puts money front and center. Camilla’s debt problems stem not from her own extravagance (she enjoys giving money to the poor much more than spending it on herself) than from the mischief of her brother, Lionel, the scapegrace black sheep, who without being actually evil, brings enormous misery to his family by a whole range of 18th-century bad-boy behavior: he gambles, hunts obsessively, has an affair with a married woman, refuses to settle on a career, accumulates large debts and playfully extorts money from the uncle he expects to be the heir of, expressing no remorse for any of this until it is too late. It is his borrowing all the money Camilla had been given for her outing to Tunbridge Wells that first sets her on the path to debt and disgrace, as seemingly small missteps lead to huge problems.
We learn along the way about how the mere rumor of future wealth assures shopkeepers will grant one credit on easy terms (Mrs. Mittin, informed by a friend, who was lied to by Lionel, spreads the false report that Camilla is to inherit the fortune of her uncle Sir Hugh, a baronet). When the rumor turns out to be untrue, the vultures start circling and we learn about money-lenders (usury is illegal but popular) and debtors’ prison, where Camilla’s father briefly lands before he is bailed out by his friends.
In addition, much of the plot is driven by Sir Hugh’s decision to settle his fortune on the brilliant, classically educated, generous and hopelessly innocent Eugenia, Camilla’s youngest sister, who is lame and smallpox-scarred through a set of childhood mishaps that Sir Hugh blames on himself. Meanwhile, Lynnmere, a cousin of Camilla’s and even more worthless than Lionel, assumes he is the heir and racks up debt accordingly. And poor saintly Eugenia is constantly at the risk of being kidnapped and forced into marriage for her money.
Men behave much worse, but women’s behavior is held to a much higher standard and thus they are often found guilty of impropriety for seemingly minor offenses. This is the lesson Camilla learns the hard way.
Women, in general, are presented as being at the mercy of capricious, money-hungry and sometimes violent men, subject to insult in public places when not properly chaperoned (a theme explored in much more detail in Evelina). Assumed to be coquettes until proven otherwise. Worse, they are allowed to express nothing. Even if they like a man, they are not supposed to reveal this preference openly; they have to wait demurely and hope the man they like picks them. If chosen by a man they do not like, their rejection runs the risk of being seen as maidenly reserve or just another species of coquettery. It is this set of assumptions Jane Austen plays off brilliantly in Pride and Prejudice in the proposal scene with Mr. Collins, when that clergyman refuses to take no for an answer:
“As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.”
This remark provokes Elizabeth to make a reply that is astonishing, not by her own standards, but by those of female behavior in novels of the era:
“I do assure you, sir, that I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere. I thank you again and again for the honor you have done me in your proposals, but to accept them is absolutely impossible. My feelings in every respect forbid it. Can I speak plainer ? Do not consider me now as an elegant female, intending to plague you, but as a rational creature, speaking the truth from her heart.”
This series of frank, concise declarations adds up to a speech Camilla could never have made, nor Clarissa, nor Evelina, nor Sophie in Tom Jones. The idea that a young woman could be “a rational creature speaking truth from her heart,” who could, without even the thought of consulting her parents, reject an offer of marriage so quickly and decisively, is deeply, yet quietly radical by the standards of the day.
We cheer it now, but we do not fully understand this; the idea that Elizabeth Bennet should have a mind of her own and use it does not amaze us. As her detractors have often observed, Jane Austen never created anything close to a proto-feminist hero; she shows suspicion of women who spend too much reading books or mastering an instrument, and no one ever makes a speech about the rights of women. But her radicalism is right under our noses, in its quiet insistence of women having feelings and thoughts that are as valid and important as those of men, and the words in which to clothe them.
Returning to Mansfield Park
June 29, 2010
Olive the smooth fox terrier. I briefly considered changing her name to Fanny Price.
I reread Mansfield Park, again. It was fantastic, but in a completely different way than before. I remember the last time I read it (in December 2008) I had been researching a lot about daily life in the era in order to try to realistically describe Liam and Rachel’s journey to 1815, and I was struck by how much more household detail there is in Mansfield Park, compared with many other of Jane Austen’s books. Mrs. Norris’s ideas about housekeeping, for example, and her interactions with servants, such as a reported conversation with the housekeeper at Sotherton:
That Mrs. Whitaker is a treasure! She was quite shocked, when I asked her whether wine was allowed at the second table, and she has turned away two housemaids for wearing white gowns.
It is the sort of remark that makes no real sense to the casual reader, 200 years later. But dropped at the end of the eventful chapter in which the party from Mansfield Park goes to visit the grand house of Maria Betram’s rich but idiotic fiance, it is not really confusing enough to make one stop, either: there is too much else going on, too much to enjoy.
What Jane Austen is doing here is giving expression to Mrs. Norris’s avarice and nosiness through telling household details. She has been “spunging” as Maria puts it, wheedling a cream cheese and some pheasant’s eggs out of the housekeeper, meanwhile pressing her for details of how Sotherton is run, something no polite person would ever do. The “second table” refers to the dining arrangements for the less important servants, the rank and file: housemaids, scullery maids, porters, as opposed to the butler, housekeeper and cooks, for the servants’ world was made up of hierarchies as clearly defined as that of their employers, with perks for the more important ones, like better food.
What may seem most strange to us now is that either group of servants would expect wine with dinner, but it was different world, with potable water a rare commodity, a world where even children might drink small (weak) beer at breakfast.
And white gowns on housemaids? Wearing white was fashionable at this time, and a signifier of status in a world lacking Shout and automatic washing machines, because it was hard to keep clean for long, and hard to get clean once it was dirty. The message of white gowns was that you had someone else doing your laundry, and lots of changes of clothes. But social striving being a constant across the centuries, it is reasonable to suppose that even housemaids would want to imitate their rich employers by wearing white, too — a species of putting on airs that Mrs. Whitaker was quick to detect and quash in the unfortunate housemaids, to the approbation of Mrs. Norris.
This time, I noticed different things: the people. Julia and Maria, in their complacent narcissism, seem altogether modern. Described in slightly different words, you could easily imagine them starring in a reality show. The part in italics below seems to me a particularly insightful observation. Who has not known someone like that?
The Miss Bertams were now fully established among the belles of the neighborhood, and as they joined to beauty and brilliant acquirements, a manner naturally easy, and carefully formed to general civility and obligingness, they possessed its favor as well as its admiration. Their vanity was in such good order that they seemed quite free from it, and gave themselves no airs; while the praises attending such behavior, secured, and brought round by their aunt, served to strengthen them in believing they had no faults.
Henry and Mary Crawford are also easily recognizable types found everywhere today: blase, amoral, mercenary, with a charm that conceals the void beneath. In the conversation between Mary, Fanny and Edmund in the chapel at Sotherton, Mary is saying exactly what most modern readers would probably feel about religion; her repeated determination to marry well (that is, to find someone with money) is also a common theme among a certain subset of contemporary women.
Fanny, by contrast, seems quite alien, and this is probably why she is hard for the 2010 reader to appreciate, along with the fact that her name has unfortunately become risible to modern ears. Her shyness, her humility, her physical weakness and her total lack of any sense of entitlement all seem like defects. The idea that she was might be a Christian heroine, a less flashy counterpart of Clarissa Harlowe or Beth March, is merely puzzling to the modern reader. Today she would be diagnosed with low self-esteem and mild depression, a meek loser in a world where winners are people like her cousins Julia and Maria. She would probably be put on Prozac. And yet despite being afraid of practically everything, she is stubborn. (An unlikely welding of traits, since we expect the nervous to be tractable, but also found in my dog, Olive, above, to such a degree that I once thought of changing her name to Fanny Price.)
Fanny stands up for what is right, resisting the theatricals with all her (limited) might, urging her cousin not to slip through the fence into the park (in one of the most symbolic moments in all Jane Austen’s writing):
“You will hurt yourself, Miss Betram,” she cried, “you will certainly hurt yourself against those spikes — you will tear your gown — you will be in danger of slipping into the Ha-Ha. You had better not go.”
She was right, of course, in the end, but no one listened. Fanny takes her stand for the unfashionable virtues: order, restraint and tradition; for meekness, humility and right-thinking. She is the person everyone ignores, the poor relation whose wishes count for nothing, even to herself. She is Jane Eyre, minus the grit. I like her more every time I read this book. But I do have to wonder what Jane Austen was thinking about when she created her. Did Fanny seem a bit annoying and goody-two-shoes even in 1814? Was Jane Austen’s own experience of being a poor relation, for example when staying at her brother Edward’s great house at Godmersham, filtered through fiction to be reflected in little Fanny?
Dull Elves
April 21, 2010
Inspired by this essay in Persuasions, which discusses By a Lady in the context of Austen biography, I went back and started rereading another book it mentions, The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. I read this when it first came out, several years ago, and I remember liking it not at all. For I had expected it to be more about Jane Austen, and less about the members of the book club, who seemed to me spoiled and Californian, with problems I could not relate to.
What a difference a few years and a few more books make! I started reading it again in the subway on the way to work and was astonished by how witty it is, how subtly it connects the plots and themes of Jane Austen’s novels with incidents from the lives of the book club members. I felt both ashamed (because I was too ignorant to get it the first time around, and blamed the book rather than myself) and happy (it’s agreeable to realize that one can grow smarter even as one grows older, and that I had). It also made me wonder how many other books that I have read and not liked and was just too stupid to understand. Certainly several Jane Austen books were like that. And I probably have not given David Copperfield its due.
Emma. I think it’s fair to say the first two or maybe three times I read Emma I did not get it at all, however one defines that term. Mortifying admission indeed! But true. I failed to get Mansfield Park the first time through (I remember reading it on a train from Amsterdam to Berlin when I was 16, with complete, unadulterated incomprehension). The next time, a long time later, I think I understood it well enough, from the perspective of the plot, but I did not like it. I resisted its implications, which are still disturbing.
Before requesting The Jane Austen Book Club I had gotten The Female Quixote from the library, so I am kind of reading these together, to curious effect. FQ was written in 1752 by Charlotte Lennox, who was friendly with both Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson. We know Jane Austen read this book, for she mentions in a 1807 letter that she is rereading, and finding it funnier than ever.
The Female Quixote is graced with a perfect title, which I admit put me off the book, because the idea seemed so odd, but now that I am reading, am enchanted with. What would Don Quixote be like if he were a woman living in England in the mid-18th century, and instead of tales of chivalry had messed up his brain with romances? He would be like Arabella! This edition features charming mid-sentence capitalization which, along with the elaborate sentence structure, makes 18th-century literature so much fun to read, to wit:
Arabella indeed had been in such a terrible Consternation, that it was some Time before she even reconciled Appearances to herself; but, as she had a most happy Facility in accommodating every Incident to her own Wishes and Conceptions, she examined this Matter in so many different Ways, drew so many Conclusions, and fansied so many Mysteries in the most indifferent Actions of the supposed noble Unknown, that she remained, at last, more than ever confirmed in the Opinion, that he was some great Personage, whom her Beauty had forced to assume an Appearance unworthy of himself: When Lucy, no longer able to keep Silence, drew off her Attention from these pleasing images, by speaking of the Carp-stealing Affair again.
I’ve finished By a Lady, and now feel free to pass judgment on it. I continue to feel the weakest thing about it was tone. I need to write a whole post on tone, and the perplexities it presents, but at this moment the analogy that presents itself is about horses (why?). A horse can tell, I am certain, if it is being ridden by someone who has never sat on a horse before, versus an experienced, confident rider. When you start reading a book, it is much the same, although it might take the reader longer than the horse to be certain. By a Lady seemed unable to decide just what it wanted to be. Was it a farce? A romance? A steamy erotic novel? Was it aiming high or low? It was wacky, but it lacked the courage of its convictions to go for broke and be quite wacky enough. In the end (and I am not giving anything away here) the reader realizes the author’s real debt is to Shakespeare, not Austen, as amazing coincidences and lost-and-found orphans lead to the longed-for happy ending. Lost-and-found orphans in Shakespeare (or in Fielding or Burney) can be accepted in a way they would not be in say, Austen. It’s all about context, too, I guess.
