Jane Austen's Hapax Legomenon

[sartorias]

A post from me about Jane Austen, romance, and writerly intent as part of the Athena's Daughters Kickstarter.

There are still tons of goodies offered.

Comments

[asakiyume]

So interesting, isn't it, that even though Austen **didn't** give us descriptions of the fashions or explanations of the invisible social rules, we get a rich sense of time and place from the stories. She wrote on her topic with such self-confidence (or maybe not: maybe she agonized and struggled, but the results seem self assured), we can fall right in with her.

I am the mistress of the three a.m. toss-and-turn endless replay, the mental fret about what I should have said.

--when you realize, at that inconvenient 3 am hour, what it was you should have said, what do you do? Do you write it down? (In this case it worked its way into an essay, but other times.) This happens to me a lot. I usually inflict the results on someone handy (poor souls)--usually my husband or kids.

[sartorias]

This time I wrote it down! But mostly I lie there and ramble the imaginary conversation that should have taken place, sigh over how much I suck socially, and eventually fall asleep.

[sartorias]

My problem is that I have limited access. In the period stuff I've been able to get, as in Jane Austen, "ton" meant style through the actual Regency period, and then more consciously made a shift in the 1820s. I also think that high society was more raffish before the 1820s--for example, after that date, you would never have had anything like the "Cyprians' Ball' celebrated, in which high society men gave a ball for prostitutes.

I get the sense that before 1820, if you were well born, anything you did had style, an idea that was very French. (The extreme example was the Princesse de . . . Harcourt, was it? She used to gamble at Louis XIV's table for hours, and when she wanted to pee or poop, she did it right there. Because she was a princess, she could not do anything that was not stylish.)

After 1820 there was so much more emphasis on elaborate manners, pronunciation, etc, the outer evidence of birth.

[whswhs]

In a sense that's a step toward democratization, though of course not an intentional step. If you have a code of how aristocrats conduct themselves, then you can have aspiring Eliza Doolitles learn to follow it.

[sartorias]

Exactly. It is no mistake, I believe, that the mega best seller novels of the seventeenth century, were basically "how to" novels on French court manners.