The Real Jane Austen, Part Three (Final Part)
Dear Readers! This is the end of my critical review of Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen (Harper 2013). Part One is HERE. Part Two is HERE.
More direct undercutting of Byrne’s argument regarding Austen’s knowledge of homosexuality occurs when she finally continues it five whole chapters later, with a discussion of Austen’s naval brothers and Mary Crawford’s pun on “Rears and Vices.” Byrne calls the pun “crude” and says that “it does make it seem that she is referring to sexual vices involving rears” (243). But immediately Byrne seems to retract this argument by default when she provides counter-evidential evidence. In the same paragraph, Byrne says, “It is worth remembering that in Mansfield Park flogging is directly connected with sexual misbehavior when ex-marine Lieutenant Price suggests ‘giving the rope’s end’ to Maria Bertram for her adultery.” Ahem. Exactly. (Flogging, by the way, is not mentioned anywhere else; this is mostly poor structure which emphasizes the wrong part of the sentence.) She then talks about Austen’s brother Admiral* Francis Austen, and how he “seems to have recalled the ‘Rears, and Vices’ joke nearly forty years after his sister wrote it” (244, but see also 6) when he said in a letter that he hoped with his promotion to Admiral (from Vice Admiral), he had left all his vices behind him. But it really doesn’t seem likely that Adm. Austen was suggesting to the young female fan of his sister to whom he was writing that he had been wont to engage in hanging offenses before he got the third star on his epaulettes. Vice covers a lot of ground in the usage of the day. Rears covers just as much ground today as it did back then. I daresay English speakers have been making puns on those two words for centuries. Mary’s pun is still a very naughty pun, but Byrne can’t prove that it’s as naughty as she makes it out to be. After all, in the novel Austen describes Admiral Crawford as “a man of vicious conduct” because he moved in with a lady friend after his wife died, and while I think it’s clear he was not a good (adoptive) parent to Henry and Mary, none of the characters is concerned about introducing William Price to him-quite the contrary!
This is also what set off my pet** peevery about Byrne’s discussion of the carpet riddle in Austen’s juvenilia (63): a person can be another person’s “pet” without being their sexual partner (see for example “teacher’s pet,” etc.), besides which I think it’s pretty ridiculous to suggest that puns must be limited to one true meaning, by author or by reader, or that what humor we get out of them is irrelevant (or illegitimate!) if it was not intended by their author. Again, I’m not saying that Byrne is wrong to argue that Austen meant the puns to be interpreted this way-I’m actually inclined to think she would’ve been happy for people to read them so***-but that I think Byrne makes the wrong argument, or fails to make her argument. She says, on page 63, “The Georgians, as is clear from the thriving trade in caricatures riddled with double entendres, were a far cry from the prudish Victorians.”**** Surely there is the argument Byrne ought to use? Instead of leaving her conclusion hanging without support?
Byrne is definitely wrong, however, when she tries to argue what Austen was feeling, especially when it contradicts Austen’s own words. For example, when Byrne examines the letter Austen wrote to her sister about Tom Lefroy’s departure in 1796, she states, “The flowing tears as she writes, misread by some biographers as signs of Jane’s broken heart, are in reality little more than the author of the vellum notebooks projecting herself into the role of the heroine of a novel of sensibility” (176). Then she glosses over Austen’s letter three years later in which she was “too proud” to ask about Lefroy, which to me suggests that Austen either cared, or more probably learned to care, about him more than Byrne thinks. I’m not going all Becoming Jane on you or anything, Readers, it’s just that there’s something about the way Byrne makes these blanket statements that just makes me want to be contrary.
Though that’s not my only difficulty with them. Here’s this: “[Austen] made late changes to her juvenile writings, as late as 1809, and these were changes made to stories intended for private use, not public consumption. Artistic perfectionism was the only reason for continuing to work on them” (276). This didn’t sit right with me, though I can’t figure out why. I also regularly read my old (unpublished) works and often make little notes and corrections, and while I am a perfectionist, that doesn’t really feel like my motivation. I enjoy my past work, and when a better turn of phrase hits me I automatically edit it. And I like to explore my changing ways of thinking, to examine what I thought (or could achieve) then and analyze how I could think or achieve better today. That is not artistic perfectionism so much as personal perfectionism-how can I make myself more perfect? It’s more fun to read old things if they are better written, but most importantly these little edits are good and very easy practice. Writing (I believe) is more craft than art, and figuring out how to correct mistakes in older work makes my current work cleaner, so that I can do more innovative things and not be held back by a lack of basic skills. I don’t know. Other perfectionist Readers, what do you think?
I had other quibbles with the book also, but most are probably not Byrne’s fault: “had began” (325), “unloosened” (329), and the like are likely either typos or acceptable usages in Byrne’s dialect; the lack of serial commas always annoys to me, and it occasionally obfuscated Byrne’s meaning, but it is undoubtedly house style of the publisher and not up to the author at all; and you know, honestly, a lot of my issues with Byrne’s style are strictly personal-her style seems perfectly reasonable for a book of this type. And then there’s this paragraph, which I don’t even know WTF to think about: “Yet another Hampshire connection was William Beckford. His father, Alderman Beckford, was the richest plantation owner-he held over twenty thousand acres-in the West Indies. He was known as the ‘uncrowned king of Jamaica.’ His son William inherited, when he was just ten, a fortune of a million pounds in cash (£150 million or $225 million today), together with estates and plantations worth millions more. He was a Gothic novelist, travel writer, art collector, builder of the extraordinary Fonthill Abbey and an infamous bisexual^. His daughter’s shocking elopement was mentioned by Jane Austen, who called her ‘our cousin Margaret’ and noted that she had been disinherited by her father.” (220-1)
We never hear anything else about cousin Margaret, sadly, nor why her elopement was shocking. And that is the biggest problem with the way Byrne structured the book. Histories of relatives and random anecdotes like the above about the Beckfords are spun out in one spot and then not tied up until later-especially distressing when the story is very interesting, as the life of Eliza Hancock de Feuillide Austen (which is worth the price of the book alone). It’s as if Byrne finds this fascinating story and starts excitedly telling us, until suddenly she remembers that she is supposed to be writing a biography of Jane Austen and not her wild relations (or Lord Byron), so she cuts off in the middle and then either says nothing, or (in the case of Eliza) summarizes hastily in a much later chapter, leaving the reader (or me at least) deeply unsatisfied (especially as Byrne argues that Eliza was the inspiration and model for Mary Crawford). There is enough fascinating about Jane Austen’s life and world (and family!) to fill volumes of books. Byrne had to choose what was within the scope she wanted, and I don’t begrudge her that, nor do I think she was wrong-I was certainly (mostly) satisfied by what Byrne selected, and I was happy enough that the book wasn’t longer.
I know this review has been mostly negative (mostly because I tend to take notes on what bugs me and not on what I like), but there was a lot about the book that I really liked. I thought Byrne had an interesting premise, her scholarship is mostly very good I think, some of her original theories (mostly about the theater) are very well-done, and she is excellent when directly in dialogue with other biographers and critics. But the best thing Byrne achieved with this work was making Austen’s brilliance clear. Take this description of Austen’s unfinished Sanditon: “Charlotte, the novel’s clear-eyed heroine, decides that ‘Some natural delicacy of Constitution … with an unfortunate turn for Medecine [sic], especially quack Medecine,’ has indeed harmed the sisters’ physical health. […] Tea is served in different pots, since they have a large selection of ‘herb-tea.’ They eat only dry toast and sip dishes of strong green tea. The seaside always attracts people drawn to an alternative lifestyle, as well as the elderly, the sick and the transient” (323). And she also has a knack for picking out those direct quotes from Austen that show why her work is so sparkling and sharp and beloved, like this, again, from Sanditon: “As far as I can understand what nervous complaints are, I have a great idea of the efficacy of air and exercise for them, daily, regular Exercise.” I quite agree. :)
If you are interested in Jane Austen’s life it is well worth reading, with a grain of salt.
Dear Readers! This concludes my half-review/half-criticism of Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen! Next time, the first chapter of Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, which I expect will be a lot more fun (for you, not for me).
Love, Susie
*Of the Red, for those keeping score, meaning he basically achieved the highest rank possible in the British Navy of the day.
**BUT NOT IN THAT WAY.
***If only to emphasize how horrible this misconduct in the Navy is-Austen talks about the great benefits of the Navy many times in the canon, and Persuasion is practically a paean to the institution, making her especially critical of anything she thinks undermines or sullies it.
As for carpet-that is a classic example of the best of these kinds of riddles, in that those in the know get one level of enjoyment out of it, but even if you are ignorant of the hidden connotation (that King James and Robert Carr were lovers), it’s still funny and clever. Austen would not need to know both meanings to think it worth repeating, and it’s really a matter of personal preference at this point (since no commentary on the subject by Austen survives, if it ever existed at all) which meaning(s) you would like to think she knew.
And to keep flogging this mountain into a molehill, also on page 63, Byrne’s emphasis on “keener penetration” means that she misses the joke, which is that James I was not terribly discerning, but also that the authorial voice in Austen’s parody history of England is so enamored with James that she will impute better motives for all his actions than any less biased reading of history could support. I think Austen was probably well-aware of both readings and that the ambiguity was funny to her. (And not just because I totally do the same thing.)
Also, I think Byrne gets the riddle backwards (unless Austen did)? Surely it should be “My second is what my first was to James I, and you tread on my whole”?
****Although that final clause could open the door to all kinds of arguments like, for instance, that the Victorians were not prudish, using Victorian pornography as examples… Scholarship is a slippery slope, Dear Readers, and best avoided.
^See what I mean about the commas?! He built an infamous bisexual???
More direct undercutting of Byrne’s argument regarding Austen’s knowledge of homosexuality occurs when she finally continues it five whole chapters later, with a discussion of Austen’s naval brothers and Mary Crawford’s pun on “Rears and Vices.” Byrne calls the pun “crude” and says that “it does make it seem that she is referring to sexual vices involving rears” (243). But immediately Byrne seems to retract this argument by default when she provides counter-evidential evidence. In the same paragraph, Byrne says, “It is worth remembering that in Mansfield Park flogging is directly connected with sexual misbehavior when ex-marine Lieutenant Price suggests ‘giving the rope’s end’ to Maria Bertram for her adultery.” Ahem. Exactly. (Flogging, by the way, is not mentioned anywhere else; this is mostly poor structure which emphasizes the wrong part of the sentence.) She then talks about Austen’s brother Admiral* Francis Austen, and how he “seems to have recalled the ‘Rears, and Vices’ joke nearly forty years after his sister wrote it” (244, but see also 6) when he said in a letter that he hoped with his promotion to Admiral (from Vice Admiral), he had left all his vices behind him. But it really doesn’t seem likely that Adm. Austen was suggesting to the young female fan of his sister to whom he was writing that he had been wont to engage in hanging offenses before he got the third star on his epaulettes. Vice covers a lot of ground in the usage of the day. Rears covers just as much ground today as it did back then. I daresay English speakers have been making puns on those two words for centuries. Mary’s pun is still a very naughty pun, but Byrne can’t prove that it’s as naughty as she makes it out to be. After all, in the novel Austen describes Admiral Crawford as “a man of vicious conduct” because he moved in with a lady friend after his wife died, and while I think it’s clear he was not a good (adoptive) parent to Henry and Mary, none of the characters is concerned about introducing William Price to him-quite the contrary!
This is also what set off my pet** peevery about Byrne’s discussion of the carpet riddle in Austen’s juvenilia (63): a person can be another person’s “pet” without being their sexual partner (see for example “teacher’s pet,” etc.), besides which I think it’s pretty ridiculous to suggest that puns must be limited to one true meaning, by author or by reader, or that what humor we get out of them is irrelevant (or illegitimate!) if it was not intended by their author. Again, I’m not saying that Byrne is wrong to argue that Austen meant the puns to be interpreted this way-I’m actually inclined to think she would’ve been happy for people to read them so***-but that I think Byrne makes the wrong argument, or fails to make her argument. She says, on page 63, “The Georgians, as is clear from the thriving trade in caricatures riddled with double entendres, were a far cry from the prudish Victorians.”**** Surely there is the argument Byrne ought to use? Instead of leaving her conclusion hanging without support?
Byrne is definitely wrong, however, when she tries to argue what Austen was feeling, especially when it contradicts Austen’s own words. For example, when Byrne examines the letter Austen wrote to her sister about Tom Lefroy’s departure in 1796, she states, “The flowing tears as she writes, misread by some biographers as signs of Jane’s broken heart, are in reality little more than the author of the vellum notebooks projecting herself into the role of the heroine of a novel of sensibility” (176). Then she glosses over Austen’s letter three years later in which she was “too proud” to ask about Lefroy, which to me suggests that Austen either cared, or more probably learned to care, about him more than Byrne thinks. I’m not going all Becoming Jane on you or anything, Readers, it’s just that there’s something about the way Byrne makes these blanket statements that just makes me want to be contrary.
Though that’s not my only difficulty with them. Here’s this: “[Austen] made late changes to her juvenile writings, as late as 1809, and these were changes made to stories intended for private use, not public consumption. Artistic perfectionism was the only reason for continuing to work on them” (276). This didn’t sit right with me, though I can’t figure out why. I also regularly read my old (unpublished) works and often make little notes and corrections, and while I am a perfectionist, that doesn’t really feel like my motivation. I enjoy my past work, and when a better turn of phrase hits me I automatically edit it. And I like to explore my changing ways of thinking, to examine what I thought (or could achieve) then and analyze how I could think or achieve better today. That is not artistic perfectionism so much as personal perfectionism-how can I make myself more perfect? It’s more fun to read old things if they are better written, but most importantly these little edits are good and very easy practice. Writing (I believe) is more craft than art, and figuring out how to correct mistakes in older work makes my current work cleaner, so that I can do more innovative things and not be held back by a lack of basic skills. I don’t know. Other perfectionist Readers, what do you think?
I had other quibbles with the book also, but most are probably not Byrne’s fault: “had began” (325), “unloosened” (329), and the like are likely either typos or acceptable usages in Byrne’s dialect; the lack of serial commas always annoys to me, and it occasionally obfuscated Byrne’s meaning, but it is undoubtedly house style of the publisher and not up to the author at all; and you know, honestly, a lot of my issues with Byrne’s style are strictly personal-her style seems perfectly reasonable for a book of this type. And then there’s this paragraph, which I don’t even know WTF to think about: “Yet another Hampshire connection was William Beckford. His father, Alderman Beckford, was the richest plantation owner-he held over twenty thousand acres-in the West Indies. He was known as the ‘uncrowned king of Jamaica.’ His son William inherited, when he was just ten, a fortune of a million pounds in cash (£150 million or $225 million today), together with estates and plantations worth millions more. He was a Gothic novelist, travel writer, art collector, builder of the extraordinary Fonthill Abbey and an infamous bisexual^. His daughter’s shocking elopement was mentioned by Jane Austen, who called her ‘our cousin Margaret’ and noted that she had been disinherited by her father.” (220-1)
We never hear anything else about cousin Margaret, sadly, nor why her elopement was shocking. And that is the biggest problem with the way Byrne structured the book. Histories of relatives and random anecdotes like the above about the Beckfords are spun out in one spot and then not tied up until later-especially distressing when the story is very interesting, as the life of Eliza Hancock de Feuillide Austen (which is worth the price of the book alone). It’s as if Byrne finds this fascinating story and starts excitedly telling us, until suddenly she remembers that she is supposed to be writing a biography of Jane Austen and not her wild relations (or Lord Byron), so she cuts off in the middle and then either says nothing, or (in the case of Eliza) summarizes hastily in a much later chapter, leaving the reader (or me at least) deeply unsatisfied (especially as Byrne argues that Eliza was the inspiration and model for Mary Crawford). There is enough fascinating about Jane Austen’s life and world (and family!) to fill volumes of books. Byrne had to choose what was within the scope she wanted, and I don’t begrudge her that, nor do I think she was wrong-I was certainly (mostly) satisfied by what Byrne selected, and I was happy enough that the book wasn’t longer.
I know this review has been mostly negative (mostly because I tend to take notes on what bugs me and not on what I like), but there was a lot about the book that I really liked. I thought Byrne had an interesting premise, her scholarship is mostly very good I think, some of her original theories (mostly about the theater) are very well-done, and she is excellent when directly in dialogue with other biographers and critics. But the best thing Byrne achieved with this work was making Austen’s brilliance clear. Take this description of Austen’s unfinished Sanditon: “Charlotte, the novel’s clear-eyed heroine, decides that ‘Some natural delicacy of Constitution … with an unfortunate turn for Medecine [sic], especially quack Medecine,’ has indeed harmed the sisters’ physical health. […] Tea is served in different pots, since they have a large selection of ‘herb-tea.’ They eat only dry toast and sip dishes of strong green tea. The seaside always attracts people drawn to an alternative lifestyle, as well as the elderly, the sick and the transient” (323). And she also has a knack for picking out those direct quotes from Austen that show why her work is so sparkling and sharp and beloved, like this, again, from Sanditon: “As far as I can understand what nervous complaints are, I have a great idea of the efficacy of air and exercise for them, daily, regular Exercise.” I quite agree. :)
If you are interested in Jane Austen’s life it is well worth reading, with a grain of salt.
Dear Readers! This concludes my half-review/half-criticism of Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen! Next time, the first chapter of Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, which I expect will be a lot more fun (for you, not for me).
Love, Susie
*Of the Red, for those keeping score, meaning he basically achieved the highest rank possible in the British Navy of the day.
**BUT NOT IN THAT WAY.
***If only to emphasize how horrible this misconduct in the Navy is-Austen talks about the great benefits of the Navy many times in the canon, and Persuasion is practically a paean to the institution, making her especially critical of anything she thinks undermines or sullies it.
As for carpet-that is a classic example of the best of these kinds of riddles, in that those in the know get one level of enjoyment out of it, but even if you are ignorant of the hidden connotation (that King James and Robert Carr were lovers), it’s still funny and clever. Austen would not need to know both meanings to think it worth repeating, and it’s really a matter of personal preference at this point (since no commentary on the subject by Austen survives, if it ever existed at all) which meaning(s) you would like to think she knew.
And to keep flogging this mountain into a molehill, also on page 63, Byrne’s emphasis on “keener penetration” means that she misses the joke, which is that James I was not terribly discerning, but also that the authorial voice in Austen’s parody history of England is so enamored with James that she will impute better motives for all his actions than any less biased reading of history could support. I think Austen was probably well-aware of both readings and that the ambiguity was funny to her. (And not just because I totally do the same thing.)
Also, I think Byrne gets the riddle backwards (unless Austen did)? Surely it should be “My second is what my first was to James I, and you tread on my whole”?
****Although that final clause could open the door to all kinds of arguments like, for instance, that the Victorians were not prudish, using Victorian pornography as examples… Scholarship is a slippery slope, Dear Readers, and best avoided.
^See what I mean about the commas?! He built an infamous bisexual???