Vorpal Sword In Hand
Human beings tell stories, to entertain, to explore, and to define themselves. We class ourselves and others by comparing the narratives of the cultures we are part of, and deciding which assumptions of another’s culture are like or unlike our own. Every other person is an alien to us, their culture a foreign planet whose ways we can never fully understand. It is the great irony, perhaps the great tragedy, of human existence that the one thing we most value of our humanity-our empathy-is something that is actually impossible for us.
No wonder telepathic connection is such a favorite theme in speculative fiction, and in our popular mythology-belief in everything from reading auras to communicating with spirit guides to the idea that twins have some near-magical psychic link speaks to this powerful yearning for connection, for truly, wholly, fully knowing some other person, inside and out. The recurring theme of True Love is part of this, but so is the urge, common to fiction and social justice alike, to comprehend what it is like to live in this world as The Other, someone who experiences the world fundamentally differently from the way you do, because of differences in sex, race, religion, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, or whatever. Stories offer us glimpses into others’ minds, offer the tiniest taste of this great ecstasy we always seek, but are always separated from.
Remarkably, stories also reassure us of the universal, that there are common components that all humans possess. We share things even with people who are most unlike us in all the world-though maybe not the same thing with everybody; if we all knew some one element of universal humanity, it would no longer be a mystery. How can it be that modern Americans can read the works of Jane Austen or William Shakespeare, or even Homer, and see the same emotions, the same psychological needs and reactions, in their characters that we see in ourselves, when the worlds of these stories are almost as psychologically far-removed from us, almost as incomprehensible to us as life in the age of dinosaurs? We can never quite picture it, even when we have pictures of it.
Things become powerful symbols of these differences between our time and theirs. The people in the Iliad are doing all that stuff without pants. People in Shakespeare’s plays and world had fleas. Living on them. Biting them and sucking their blood. All the time. OK, fleas are animals and not things, but still. Fleas. Even our dogs and cats don’t have fleas!* But how about chamber pots because there were no toilets, or the gutters in the streets filled with human excreta because there were no sewers? We can’t imagine what that world smelled like. And yet humans still felt the need to try to make themselves smell as nice as possible, and keep their clothes as clean as possible.
Jane Austen’s time seems much more familiar (though still no indoor plumbing), but even there, when we stop to think about it, we find an alien landscape: they wore so many layers of clothes because their houses had no heat; everything smelled of wood smoke, or worse, coal smoke; white clothing was luxurious because there were so many ways to get it dirty (stepping outside your house, standing near the sooty fireplace, dripping candle wax on it). But these are big differences-traveling by horse instead of car, communicating by letter instead of Twitter, reaping grain by scythe instead of a mechanical harvester-and big differences are the easiest to understand. It’s the smallest things that speak most strongly of how different a time it was.
Take the act of reading a novel. Novels were new, for one thing, and people debated a lot about whether authors should even try to depict realistic human behavior-something we take for granted today. Books were expensive and rare, so you chose carefully the few (or one) you bought each year; lending libraries (available only in larger towns) charged a fee and their selections were small. Every novel was a trilogy, even ones as short as Pride and Prejudice, with each volume published months apart, and not much choice in what to read while you were waiting for the next installment. When you first got a new book, you read it with a knife at hand to cut the pages apart because the printers and binders didn’t do it. And most likely you did not curl up by yourself in bed and read alone all day, no, you read it aloud with your family by firelight(!), and being able to read aloud well was a highly valued social skill. The object-a book-was nearly the same, but the little differences in this object and its modern equivalent speak volumes about what daily life was really like for those people versus what it’s like for us.
This is the essential idea behind The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne, a biography of Dear Aunt Jane that does not follow a list of Events in her life (though it is mostly chronological), but rather explores her life through the context of the world she lived in, using twenty objects as jumping-off points (counting the ones in the Prologue and Epilogue). All page numbers refer to the First U.S. Edition (HarperCollins, 2013).
The book is well- and beautifully-designed, with plenty of black-and-white pictures of objects useful for reader understanding (such as portraits of important people, reproductions of cartoons from the period, and paintings, including an apparent portrait from life of Jane Austen herself, which Byrne discovered), as well as color plates of nineteen of the “small things” of the title-which are reproduced at the start of each chapter in pen and ink line drawings by Sara Mulvanny. These drawings were a source of both enjoyment and annoyance: they added greatly to the prettiness of the interior design of the book and they provided a handy reference of the objects so that I didn’t have to keep flipping to the plates, but some of them seemed hastily done and, especially where they reproduced text, were rife with errors, such as the illustrations for The Theatrical Scenes (134), The Marriage Banns (172), and The Royalty Cheque (288). I really wanted to explain to Mulvanny that the “long s” is not an “f.” ** The Austens were not selling their “horfe” (along with all their worldly possessions), but their horse. It is a pleasure to flip through the book, between the typeface and the tiny symbols, unique to each one, that precede the text in each chapter (and which got their own byline on the copyright page!-designed by Vera Brice), and I suspect I would have been more amused than critical of the illustrations had Byrne’s text not also been full of small errors.
I came to this book having never read a biography of Austen beyond the paragraphs that invariably appear in modern editions of her novels, and having only the most basic working knowledge of the Georgian period, so much of the content was new to me in whole or in the details, and, burgeoning Janeite that I am, I found it fascinating. Byrne’s main purpose is to show that Austen was not the quiet old maid of the Victorian family biography of her (which I have not read, but whence “Dear Aunt Jane” comes), or, as the biographical note in my edition of Mansfield Park (Signet Classics, 1996) has it, someone who “was educated at home” and “never lived apart from her family,” but rather a woman whose travels and connections gave her a much greater sense of the world than even her readers might realize. Byrne illuminates the hints of Austen’s worldly sensibilities that appear not only in her published novels but in her fragments and juvenilia, and also makes the case for many things Austen would have known that did not appear in her works, but that might have, had she lived a little longer.
For example, one of Austen’s brothers, Edward, was adopted by wealthy childless relatives, the Knights, and brought up by them from the age of thirteen or so as their heir. That Jane felt that this was hard on the family emotionally, but ultimately beneficial to them, is hinted at strongly by her treatment of such adoptions in her novels Mansfield Park and Emma.^^ In the latter Austen even has the characters discuss the issue when Emma’s sister Isabella Knightley decries it as unnatural, even though it was very common during that period of history (15). Austen herself benefitted from Edward’s adoption enormously: when Edward inherited the Knight estate, he provided the cottage at Chawton for Jane, her sister, and their mother to live in and where Jane completed all of her published works.
Austen’s father taught students (all boys) who boarded in their home, allowing Jane and her sister Cassandra much opportunity for socializing with their local genteel peers, as well as a few aristocrats. (Cassandra later became engaged to a man who had been one of her father’s students.) Growing up in a house with six brothers and as many boarders belies the image of a quiet country home, and was undoubtedly a strong influence on Austen’s early writing-lively and irreverent stories filled with sin and crime and broad satire of the literature of the day as well as the texts the children read in the schoolroom. And far from being always at home, between the ages of seven and eleven Jane was sent away to school herself, living with her sister in establishments not unlike Mrs. Goddard’s where Harriet Smith lives in Emma. The girls also had some freedom to travel, going unaccompanied by their parents to visit relatives.
Children in general had a rather different place in Austen’s world than in ours. Unusually (to us), newlyweds would often take a child they knew with them on their honeymoons, to give them an opportunity to see sights they would otherwise not have access to, since for many people the honeymoon was one of the only chances in their lives to travel for pleasure. This telling detail reminds us again that people back then had different expectations of what marriage was for, what children were for, what family was. Practicality was important to them, and in an age where early death of children and parents was common, where estates had to be passed down to someone, sentimentality toward children, and even mourning a young wife or child was seen as impractical and self-indulgent. Hence the view that adoption, however difficult on the child or family, was for the greater good of all, and therefore to be happily accepted.
But of course, these were people, and kindness was important too, even if it looked a little different sometimes back then. Something that does not appear in Austen’s published works, but which surely had an impact on her, was disability. Both her mother’s brother and her own brother George had developmental disabilities that prevented them from integrating into their society. Each was sent by his parents to live out his life cared for by some other family (who were paid for this service), quietly and out of view of the family’s friends and relations. The families loved these children and (the mothers at least) occasionally visited them. Yet at this time mores were changing. Perhaps due to George III’s poor mental health, it became slightly less socially stigmatized to admit “madness” (as just about any atypicality in mental health or development was classed) in the family. In the next generation, Austen’s first cousin Eliza de Feuillide decided to raise her developmentally disabled son (and only child) Hastings herself. (Though some of that may be artifact of Eliza having the glamour and force of personality to carry off just about anything she wanted.) And Austen herself was in close contact with madness through her father’s students-as Byrne puts it, “Our customary image of Jane Austen’s family home does not usually make room for her fond memories of the lunatic Earl.” (21)***
Byrne is at her best when she is directly challenging an accepted reading of Austen’s life and work, and where she has ample textual evidence. For example, while it will come as no surprise to people who’ve read Austen’s canon-every book deals frankly with sexual desire (or repulsion) and sexual impropriety-it does go against the popular understanding of Austen’s works, the 19th Century, and old maids in general when Byrne notes, “Jane Austen also wrote about women’s sexual pleasure. In the character of Lydia Bennet she presents us with a lusty teenage girl who enjoys sex before marriage with Wickham with very little concern for the consequences.” (184) [Though I think Byrne is right about Lydia, I don’t think that makes Wickham not predatory (as she presents the Lydia/Wickham subplot in opposition to “women as victims of predatory men”)-see his near-seduction of Georgiana Darcy, and of course his indifference to Lydia’s future; she may be enjoying herself now, but Wickham would’ve quickly left her in the lurch if not for the powerful incentive of Mr. Darcy’s money.]
Or when Byrne presents a less obvious conclusion about a text that contradicts the (in my opinion poorly reasoned) prevailing view: “Mansfield Park [the house] has often been seen by critics as a symbol of England itself. The interlopers, who create havoc, are London strangers, Mary and Henry Crawford, who threaten the ways and values of the country. But the Crawfords are merely the agents of change: the real corruption rests at the door of the flawed custodians of the house, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris.” (216) And this: “Like Shakespeare’s Prospero, [Sir Thomas] acknowledges that Mrs. Norris is his Caliban, a monster that he has created […]” (222) I agree with this completely. Mansfield Park is a story about lousy parenting and the consequences thereof. I don’t think Austen blames it all on Mrs. Norris, though. Hers is a bad family, all three sisters woefully flawed and incompetent. And I think Austen pretty clearly lays the blame for Henry and Mary’s faults not just on their fast London crowd, but on their raising by the admiral, who is according to the narrator “a man of vicious conduct.” Vicious meant something slightly different to Austen than it does to us, but it’s still very strong disapprobation.
And also when Byrne has Austen’s letters for clear support, and her unfinished novels, as when she explains Austen’s views on seaside resorts: “Brighton is the dissipated backdrop for the sexually active Lydia Bennet […] In Mansfield Park Weymouth is the backdrop for Tom Bertram’s disastrous meeting with John Yates […] and it is the place where Frank Churchill meets and becomes engaged to Jane Fairfax in Emma. ‘I am really very glad that we did not go there,’ Austen says of [Weymouth in one of her letters] and indeed we do not go there in the novels.” (321) Or when discussing the unfinished final novel Sanditon, since it includes many elements not seen in Austen’s canon: it apparently was a more ambitious novel than the others, with a large cast tied together by a shared venue-almost a precursor to George Eliot’s Middlemarch-while the characters themselves are not necessarily what we’re used to, between an aspiring-rapist villain, a poor girl who unexpectedly inherits a fortune, and a hero who comes from a large family of hypochondriacs. As for the minor characters, Byrne says, “A mixed-race girl and a woman with batty views on medicine and diet, together in a bathing machine on a Sussex beach: this is not our usual image of Jane Austen’s novels.” (324) Indeed.
My favorite parts of the book are when Byrne relates stories of Jane’s world that will come as a surprise to people who’ve only read the canon, such as the chapter about Austen’s globe-trotting (and affair-having) relatives: her aunt Philadelphia Hancock and Phila’s daughter Eliza de Feuillide (Chapter 2, The East Indian Shawl); or about Austen’s own traveling ways (Chapter 6, The Barouche), and her life as a published author (Chapter 17, The Royalty Cheque). And I really appreciated the detailed treatment Byrne gave Austen’s juvenilia and unfinished works, assuming correctly that many readers would not be familiar with them (The Vellum Notebooks, The Laptop, and The Bathing Machine, chapters 3, 16, and 18, respectively). And most especially fascinating were Byrne’s discussions of the novels Austen read (as in The Subscription List, chapter 4), where Byrne shows not just Austen’s influences, but why Austen was actually an innovative and important writer in her day. Byrne does not come right out and say, ‘Jane Austen helped invent the modern novel as we picture it today,’ but she doesn’t have to-the evidence speaks for itself, and gave me a new appreciation for Austen’s craft, as not just the internal perfection of her works, but as a dialogue with her contemporaries about the role of fiction and human nature itself.
Dear Readers! Since everything I write lately is hugely long and takes me forever, I’m dividing this review into three parts, with the rest (which is mostly what I didn’t like about the book) to follow over the next two days. Click HERE to go to Part Two!
Love, Susie
*Better living through chemistry!
**Remember the wizard Baruffio… Actually, while we’re on the subject (not Wizard Baruffio… 18th C. and earlier printing style), the ad for the auction at Steventon Parsonage in 1801 is very fun for people interested in old lettering and printing as it includes many long esses alone or in combination, as well as ligatures^ of “ct”, and the abbreviation “&c.” And of course, it’s a great object for Byrne’s purposes, listing as it does all manner of other objects that lend themselves well to the imagination-microscope, “terrestial” globe, bookcase with six doors, mattresses, tables on pillars and claws, eight-day clock [only needs winding every eight days??], and 200 books.
As for long esses, while they went out of use in printed English shortly before Jane Austen published her novels, they are still used today: in calculus where they appear as the integral symbol (standing in for the Latin summa meaning sum), and in the German letter “Scharfes S” which is a ligature of a long s and a short one (or a long s and a z, occasionally, which is called an “Eszett”). One final piece of trivia for you: long esses are only ever miniscule letters, there is no majuscule long ess. Oh yes, and they are only at the beginning or middle of words, short esses end words (so alternate names for them are medial and terminal s respectively).
^That’s a perfectly good word, but it seems like one that’s only used on crime shows nowadays, so it feels weird to write it here, as if the letters were running around the printing press garroting each other…
***The anecdote about Lord Portsmouth also introduces Byrne’s obsession with Byron, which appears so often that by the time I finished the book I was asking why she didn’t just write a biography of him, instead of inserting it into this book. It’s also part of a larger habit of namedropping, where Byrne discovers that some well-known figure of the time (often not known to me at all) was distantly related to Austen, but whom Jane probably didn’t know well if at all. This is sometimes ludicrous and often (especially regarding Byron) annoying.
^^OK, Frank Churchill is not beneficial to anyone. But had he had siblings, he might have been to them. And certainly Mr. Weston is happy that he could give Frank a more comfortable life.
No wonder telepathic connection is such a favorite theme in speculative fiction, and in our popular mythology-belief in everything from reading auras to communicating with spirit guides to the idea that twins have some near-magical psychic link speaks to this powerful yearning for connection, for truly, wholly, fully knowing some other person, inside and out. The recurring theme of True Love is part of this, but so is the urge, common to fiction and social justice alike, to comprehend what it is like to live in this world as The Other, someone who experiences the world fundamentally differently from the way you do, because of differences in sex, race, religion, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, or whatever. Stories offer us glimpses into others’ minds, offer the tiniest taste of this great ecstasy we always seek, but are always separated from.
Remarkably, stories also reassure us of the universal, that there are common components that all humans possess. We share things even with people who are most unlike us in all the world-though maybe not the same thing with everybody; if we all knew some one element of universal humanity, it would no longer be a mystery. How can it be that modern Americans can read the works of Jane Austen or William Shakespeare, or even Homer, and see the same emotions, the same psychological needs and reactions, in their characters that we see in ourselves, when the worlds of these stories are almost as psychologically far-removed from us, almost as incomprehensible to us as life in the age of dinosaurs? We can never quite picture it, even when we have pictures of it.
Things become powerful symbols of these differences between our time and theirs. The people in the Iliad are doing all that stuff without pants. People in Shakespeare’s plays and world had fleas. Living on them. Biting them and sucking their blood. All the time. OK, fleas are animals and not things, but still. Fleas. Even our dogs and cats don’t have fleas!* But how about chamber pots because there were no toilets, or the gutters in the streets filled with human excreta because there were no sewers? We can’t imagine what that world smelled like. And yet humans still felt the need to try to make themselves smell as nice as possible, and keep their clothes as clean as possible.
Jane Austen’s time seems much more familiar (though still no indoor plumbing), but even there, when we stop to think about it, we find an alien landscape: they wore so many layers of clothes because their houses had no heat; everything smelled of wood smoke, or worse, coal smoke; white clothing was luxurious because there were so many ways to get it dirty (stepping outside your house, standing near the sooty fireplace, dripping candle wax on it). But these are big differences-traveling by horse instead of car, communicating by letter instead of Twitter, reaping grain by scythe instead of a mechanical harvester-and big differences are the easiest to understand. It’s the smallest things that speak most strongly of how different a time it was.
Take the act of reading a novel. Novels were new, for one thing, and people debated a lot about whether authors should even try to depict realistic human behavior-something we take for granted today. Books were expensive and rare, so you chose carefully the few (or one) you bought each year; lending libraries (available only in larger towns) charged a fee and their selections were small. Every novel was a trilogy, even ones as short as Pride and Prejudice, with each volume published months apart, and not much choice in what to read while you were waiting for the next installment. When you first got a new book, you read it with a knife at hand to cut the pages apart because the printers and binders didn’t do it. And most likely you did not curl up by yourself in bed and read alone all day, no, you read it aloud with your family by firelight(!), and being able to read aloud well was a highly valued social skill. The object-a book-was nearly the same, but the little differences in this object and its modern equivalent speak volumes about what daily life was really like for those people versus what it’s like for us.
This is the essential idea behind The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne, a biography of Dear Aunt Jane that does not follow a list of Events in her life (though it is mostly chronological), but rather explores her life through the context of the world she lived in, using twenty objects as jumping-off points (counting the ones in the Prologue and Epilogue). All page numbers refer to the First U.S. Edition (HarperCollins, 2013).
The book is well- and beautifully-designed, with plenty of black-and-white pictures of objects useful for reader understanding (such as portraits of important people, reproductions of cartoons from the period, and paintings, including an apparent portrait from life of Jane Austen herself, which Byrne discovered), as well as color plates of nineteen of the “small things” of the title-which are reproduced at the start of each chapter in pen and ink line drawings by Sara Mulvanny. These drawings were a source of both enjoyment and annoyance: they added greatly to the prettiness of the interior design of the book and they provided a handy reference of the objects so that I didn’t have to keep flipping to the plates, but some of them seemed hastily done and, especially where they reproduced text, were rife with errors, such as the illustrations for The Theatrical Scenes (134), The Marriage Banns (172), and The Royalty Cheque (288). I really wanted to explain to Mulvanny that the “long s” is not an “f.” ** The Austens were not selling their “horfe” (along with all their worldly possessions), but their horse. It is a pleasure to flip through the book, between the typeface and the tiny symbols, unique to each one, that precede the text in each chapter (and which got their own byline on the copyright page!-designed by Vera Brice), and I suspect I would have been more amused than critical of the illustrations had Byrne’s text not also been full of small errors.
I came to this book having never read a biography of Austen beyond the paragraphs that invariably appear in modern editions of her novels, and having only the most basic working knowledge of the Georgian period, so much of the content was new to me in whole or in the details, and, burgeoning Janeite that I am, I found it fascinating. Byrne’s main purpose is to show that Austen was not the quiet old maid of the Victorian family biography of her (which I have not read, but whence “Dear Aunt Jane” comes), or, as the biographical note in my edition of Mansfield Park (Signet Classics, 1996) has it, someone who “was educated at home” and “never lived apart from her family,” but rather a woman whose travels and connections gave her a much greater sense of the world than even her readers might realize. Byrne illuminates the hints of Austen’s worldly sensibilities that appear not only in her published novels but in her fragments and juvenilia, and also makes the case for many things Austen would have known that did not appear in her works, but that might have, had she lived a little longer.
For example, one of Austen’s brothers, Edward, was adopted by wealthy childless relatives, the Knights, and brought up by them from the age of thirteen or so as their heir. That Jane felt that this was hard on the family emotionally, but ultimately beneficial to them, is hinted at strongly by her treatment of such adoptions in her novels Mansfield Park and Emma.^^ In the latter Austen even has the characters discuss the issue when Emma’s sister Isabella Knightley decries it as unnatural, even though it was very common during that period of history (15). Austen herself benefitted from Edward’s adoption enormously: when Edward inherited the Knight estate, he provided the cottage at Chawton for Jane, her sister, and their mother to live in and where Jane completed all of her published works.
Austen’s father taught students (all boys) who boarded in their home, allowing Jane and her sister Cassandra much opportunity for socializing with their local genteel peers, as well as a few aristocrats. (Cassandra later became engaged to a man who had been one of her father’s students.) Growing up in a house with six brothers and as many boarders belies the image of a quiet country home, and was undoubtedly a strong influence on Austen’s early writing-lively and irreverent stories filled with sin and crime and broad satire of the literature of the day as well as the texts the children read in the schoolroom. And far from being always at home, between the ages of seven and eleven Jane was sent away to school herself, living with her sister in establishments not unlike Mrs. Goddard’s where Harriet Smith lives in Emma. The girls also had some freedom to travel, going unaccompanied by their parents to visit relatives.
Children in general had a rather different place in Austen’s world than in ours. Unusually (to us), newlyweds would often take a child they knew with them on their honeymoons, to give them an opportunity to see sights they would otherwise not have access to, since for many people the honeymoon was one of the only chances in their lives to travel for pleasure. This telling detail reminds us again that people back then had different expectations of what marriage was for, what children were for, what family was. Practicality was important to them, and in an age where early death of children and parents was common, where estates had to be passed down to someone, sentimentality toward children, and even mourning a young wife or child was seen as impractical and self-indulgent. Hence the view that adoption, however difficult on the child or family, was for the greater good of all, and therefore to be happily accepted.
But of course, these were people, and kindness was important too, even if it looked a little different sometimes back then. Something that does not appear in Austen’s published works, but which surely had an impact on her, was disability. Both her mother’s brother and her own brother George had developmental disabilities that prevented them from integrating into their society. Each was sent by his parents to live out his life cared for by some other family (who were paid for this service), quietly and out of view of the family’s friends and relations. The families loved these children and (the mothers at least) occasionally visited them. Yet at this time mores were changing. Perhaps due to George III’s poor mental health, it became slightly less socially stigmatized to admit “madness” (as just about any atypicality in mental health or development was classed) in the family. In the next generation, Austen’s first cousin Eliza de Feuillide decided to raise her developmentally disabled son (and only child) Hastings herself. (Though some of that may be artifact of Eliza having the glamour and force of personality to carry off just about anything she wanted.) And Austen herself was in close contact with madness through her father’s students-as Byrne puts it, “Our customary image of Jane Austen’s family home does not usually make room for her fond memories of the lunatic Earl.” (21)***
Byrne is at her best when she is directly challenging an accepted reading of Austen’s life and work, and where she has ample textual evidence. For example, while it will come as no surprise to people who’ve read Austen’s canon-every book deals frankly with sexual desire (or repulsion) and sexual impropriety-it does go against the popular understanding of Austen’s works, the 19th Century, and old maids in general when Byrne notes, “Jane Austen also wrote about women’s sexual pleasure. In the character of Lydia Bennet she presents us with a lusty teenage girl who enjoys sex before marriage with Wickham with very little concern for the consequences.” (184) [Though I think Byrne is right about Lydia, I don’t think that makes Wickham not predatory (as she presents the Lydia/Wickham subplot in opposition to “women as victims of predatory men”)-see his near-seduction of Georgiana Darcy, and of course his indifference to Lydia’s future; she may be enjoying herself now, but Wickham would’ve quickly left her in the lurch if not for the powerful incentive of Mr. Darcy’s money.]
Or when Byrne presents a less obvious conclusion about a text that contradicts the (in my opinion poorly reasoned) prevailing view: “Mansfield Park [the house] has often been seen by critics as a symbol of England itself. The interlopers, who create havoc, are London strangers, Mary and Henry Crawford, who threaten the ways and values of the country. But the Crawfords are merely the agents of change: the real corruption rests at the door of the flawed custodians of the house, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris.” (216) And this: “Like Shakespeare’s Prospero, [Sir Thomas] acknowledges that Mrs. Norris is his Caliban, a monster that he has created […]” (222) I agree with this completely. Mansfield Park is a story about lousy parenting and the consequences thereof. I don’t think Austen blames it all on Mrs. Norris, though. Hers is a bad family, all three sisters woefully flawed and incompetent. And I think Austen pretty clearly lays the blame for Henry and Mary’s faults not just on their fast London crowd, but on their raising by the admiral, who is according to the narrator “a man of vicious conduct.” Vicious meant something slightly different to Austen than it does to us, but it’s still very strong disapprobation.
And also when Byrne has Austen’s letters for clear support, and her unfinished novels, as when she explains Austen’s views on seaside resorts: “Brighton is the dissipated backdrop for the sexually active Lydia Bennet […] In Mansfield Park Weymouth is the backdrop for Tom Bertram’s disastrous meeting with John Yates […] and it is the place where Frank Churchill meets and becomes engaged to Jane Fairfax in Emma. ‘I am really very glad that we did not go there,’ Austen says of [Weymouth in one of her letters] and indeed we do not go there in the novels.” (321) Or when discussing the unfinished final novel Sanditon, since it includes many elements not seen in Austen’s canon: it apparently was a more ambitious novel than the others, with a large cast tied together by a shared venue-almost a precursor to George Eliot’s Middlemarch-while the characters themselves are not necessarily what we’re used to, between an aspiring-rapist villain, a poor girl who unexpectedly inherits a fortune, and a hero who comes from a large family of hypochondriacs. As for the minor characters, Byrne says, “A mixed-race girl and a woman with batty views on medicine and diet, together in a bathing machine on a Sussex beach: this is not our usual image of Jane Austen’s novels.” (324) Indeed.
My favorite parts of the book are when Byrne relates stories of Jane’s world that will come as a surprise to people who’ve only read the canon, such as the chapter about Austen’s globe-trotting (and affair-having) relatives: her aunt Philadelphia Hancock and Phila’s daughter Eliza de Feuillide (Chapter 2, The East Indian Shawl); or about Austen’s own traveling ways (Chapter 6, The Barouche), and her life as a published author (Chapter 17, The Royalty Cheque). And I really appreciated the detailed treatment Byrne gave Austen’s juvenilia and unfinished works, assuming correctly that many readers would not be familiar with them (The Vellum Notebooks, The Laptop, and The Bathing Machine, chapters 3, 16, and 18, respectively). And most especially fascinating were Byrne’s discussions of the novels Austen read (as in The Subscription List, chapter 4), where Byrne shows not just Austen’s influences, but why Austen was actually an innovative and important writer in her day. Byrne does not come right out and say, ‘Jane Austen helped invent the modern novel as we picture it today,’ but she doesn’t have to-the evidence speaks for itself, and gave me a new appreciation for Austen’s craft, as not just the internal perfection of her works, but as a dialogue with her contemporaries about the role of fiction and human nature itself.
Dear Readers! Since everything I write lately is hugely long and takes me forever, I’m dividing this review into three parts, with the rest (which is mostly what I didn’t like about the book) to follow over the next two days. Click HERE to go to Part Two!
Love, Susie
*Better living through chemistry!
**Remember the wizard Baruffio… Actually, while we’re on the subject (not Wizard Baruffio… 18th C. and earlier printing style), the ad for the auction at Steventon Parsonage in 1801 is very fun for people interested in old lettering and printing as it includes many long esses alone or in combination, as well as ligatures^ of “ct”, and the abbreviation “&c.” And of course, it’s a great object for Byrne’s purposes, listing as it does all manner of other objects that lend themselves well to the imagination-microscope, “terrestial” globe, bookcase with six doors, mattresses, tables on pillars and claws, eight-day clock [only needs winding every eight days??], and 200 books.
As for long esses, while they went out of use in printed English shortly before Jane Austen published her novels, they are still used today: in calculus where they appear as the integral symbol (standing in for the Latin summa meaning sum), and in the German letter “Scharfes S” which is a ligature of a long s and a short one (or a long s and a z, occasionally, which is called an “Eszett”). One final piece of trivia for you: long esses are only ever miniscule letters, there is no majuscule long ess. Oh yes, and they are only at the beginning or middle of words, short esses end words (so alternate names for them are medial and terminal s respectively).
^That’s a perfectly good word, but it seems like one that’s only used on crime shows nowadays, so it feels weird to write it here, as if the letters were running around the printing press garroting each other…
***The anecdote about Lord Portsmouth also introduces Byrne’s obsession with Byron, which appears so often that by the time I finished the book I was asking why she didn’t just write a biography of him, instead of inserting it into this book. It’s also part of a larger habit of namedropping, where Byrne discovers that some well-known figure of the time (often not known to me at all) was distantly related to Austen, but whom Jane probably didn’t know well if at all. This is sometimes ludicrous and often (especially regarding Byron) annoying.
^^OK, Frank Churchill is not beneficial to anyone. But had he had siblings, he might have been to them. And certainly Mr. Weston is happy that he could give Frank a more comfortable life.