Jane Austen Fashion ~ Fashion & Needlework in the Works of Jane Austen

Excellent Press. 1999
by Penelope Byrde

To a Janeite used to consulting a fading photocopy of Byrde’s long-out-of-print monograph, A Frivolous Distinction, the release of this publication is most welcome. The text of the 1979 work remains substantially unchanged, but new illustrations have been added and the book has been redesigned by Penny Mills.

Penelope Byrde, Curator of the Museum of Costume and Fashion Research Centre in Bath, has written several books on the history of costume and is an authority on dress in 19th century literature. She is a life member of the Jane Austen Society.

As noted in the Preface:

Jane Austen’s own viewpoint offers valuable insights into the dress of her time. She tells us not only what clothes were fashionable... but how they were made, where they were bought, what was worn for special occasions and what her contemporaries thought and felt about their clothes.

Byrde interprets Jane’s ‘insights’ to make them more meaningful for the modern reader. There are six chapters – Jane Austen (and the place of fashion in the period), Women’s Dress, The Making and Care of Clothes, Dress for Special Occasions, Men’s Dress and Needlework – a useful Guide to Textile Terms, an extensive Reference section and a Short Bibliography.

Each chapter includes a general introduction and discussions of aspects of dress with quotations from Jane Austen’s works. For example, over two pages are devoted to footwear. The reader learns how ‘pattens’, which Anne Elliot found so trying in Persuasion, were ‘banished from good society and used only in menial work’ by the early 19th century, while the features of half-boots debated by Lord Osborne and Emma in The Watsons, and employed by Emma Woodhouse to attract Mr Elton’s attention in Emma, are described in detail.

Snippets of trivia will enhance future enjoyment of Jane Austen’s writings. The reader learns for example that umbrellas are ‘usually green’ and why ‘brides often wore riding habit for ‘going away’’.

The book is stunningly illustrated with over 36 full colour glossy plates. Each plate is explained in detail and has been carefully chosen to complement passages in the text. Where applicable, plates refer to specific scenes in the novels – why Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey considered the innumerable capes of Henry Tilney’s greatcoat ‘looked so becomingly important’, and why at the Bath Assembly Rooms she and Mrs Allen ‘saw nothing of the dancers but the high feathers of some of the ladies’, will become apparent from the illustrations.

In addition to being an essential reference tool for those interested in the social background of the period, Jane Austen Fashion is a delightfully produced book, which all Janeites would welcome into their library.

Marlene Arditto

Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? Further Puzzles in Classic Fiction

by John Sutherland
OUP, 1999

John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London, with numerous publications to his name.

This book is the third of a series – the first Is Heathcliff a Murderer? and the second Can Jane Eyre be Happy? All three books are based on very close readings of the texts, and Professor Sutherland welcomes and incorporates into his text suggestions, questions and comments from his readers.

Some of the questions posed in this volume are ‘What do we know about Frances Price (the first)?’, ‘How did the Cratchits cook Scrooge’s turkey?’, ‘Is Betsey Trotwood and spinster?’, and of course ‘Who betrays Elizabeth Bennet?’ – that is, how does Lady Catherine de Bourgh hear (inaccurately) of Elizabeth’s coming engagement to Mr Darcy, even before Mrs Bennet, whose ear can be presumed to be firmly attuned to gossip of such importance?

Questions in previous works of particular interest to members include ‘How vulgar is Mrs Elton?’ and ‘Pug: dog or bitch?’

Not only is Professor Sutherland thoroughly conversant with the texts of the books he discusses, but he has a wicked sense of humour, and obviously takes a delight in the many letters of support or criticism he receives from readers as diverse as Deirdre Le Faye and group of schoolchildren in a school in Bahrain. One reader of Can Jane Eyre be happy?, although agreeing with his conclusions, is afraid that ‘Even now you may be hiding from the Mr Rochester Revenge Squad’.

In referring to a conference seminar held at the University of Bologna in 1997, devoted to what he calls ‘my line’ and entitled Is Ophelia a Virgin?, Professor Sutherland comments: ‘Bologna, I am pleased to note, is the academic home of Umberto Eco and, as lovers of delicatessen will know, baloney.’

This book and its predecessors are very amusing, but their author is gifted with more than ‘a talent to amuse’. He seeks to send us back to books which we think we know well, and to encourage us to question some of our assumptions.

In his Preface to Can Jane Eyre be Happy?, he writes: ‘...the poor fictionist’s seeming errors, anomalies, illogicalities and contradictions are investigated, tenderly rather than roughly I trust, for the light they shed on the complexities of fiction and its power over us.’

He also mentions in this Preface that he ‘enjoyed’ writing the first of the series, and one has the impression that he also enjoyed writing the books which followed. It is obvious that here is a man who loves books, but with a love that is both serious and light-hearted. He is having fun and we are invited to share it.

I can see that Professor Sutherland would be a major success at one of our conferences! In the meantime we should add his three ‘puzzle’ books to our library.

Marjorie Jones

Women's Writing, Vol 5, No 1, 1998, Special Number: Jane Austen

Guest Editor: Mary Waldron
Greenwood Press Connecticut 1998

Mary Waldron (the guest editor for this special edition) writes,

No writer, except perhaps Shakespeare, has been approached by a greater variety of critical routes than Jane Austen. This collection of essays is a reflection of that situation; it has no consistent theme.’ (p3).

The contributors to this journal seek to extend our understanding of both Jane Austen’s life and her novels by exploring particular aspects of 18th and 19th century history. It is a collection of essays of interest to, and accessible to, a wide range of Austen’s readers.

B C Southam’s ‘An easy step to silence: Jane Austen and the political context’ is an excellent piece. Through biographical details it identifies her divided loyalties: the Tory views she inherited from her father and shared with her brothers, and the Stuart sympathies she inherited from her mother’s family, the Leighs. Her Stuart sympathies are evident in the History of England but her major novels depict conservative, rural gentry life – a Tory life. One aspect of politics which is evident in the novels is the idea of ‘interest’. Mr Austen had been active in exercising what little interest he had on behalf of his sailor sons and Jane Austen uses her awareness of this to great effect in Mansfield Park when she shows how Henry Crawford’s interest is exerted on behalf of William Price. Even though much of her political knowledge is excluded from her novels, Southam does demonstrate that Jane Austen was not ignorant of the world outside her family circle.

I am sure some people will be interested in Judy Simons’ ‘Classics and Trash: reading Austen in the 1990s’. However, as a reader who is more interested in extending my knowledge of Regency history and thereby Jane Austen’s world, I find it hard to be enthusiastic about why people write sequels or rewrite them to produce 1990s trash films, and how these relate to the original works and our reading of them.

Carolyn D Williams’s essay ‘General Tilney and the Maidens all Forlorn: typecasting in Northanger Abbey’ goes a long way towards making General Tilney a more credible character. Many readers can’t understand how anyone who claims to be a gentleman can act the way he did to Catherine Morland. By looking at generals Jane Austen knew, read of in novels, and real ones she read about in newspapers, we get a much broader picture of what some generals were really like. Instead of simply assuming a general must be a responsible and honourable man who has earned his military rank, we learn that the picture Jane Austen paints of General Tilney is not so far-fetched after all. Williams’ narration of the Gunning affair in particular presents us with a general who shares with General Tilney the characteristics of avarice, love of rank and connections, and the ability to throw young women out of their homes. As the Gunning affair happened in the early 1790s, General Tilney may well have been partially modelled on General Gunning.

Lisa Hopkins’ ‘Food and Growth in Emma’ initially identifies the underlying theme of motherhood in Emma: the lack of mothers in several characters’ lives, the role of substitute mothers, Mrs Weston’s rarely mentioned pregnancy and Emma's growth and maturation against the background of that pregnancy. The major part of the essay examines the significance of food and its uses in Highbury society. The essay is an interesting introduction to the role of food in Emma, however Maggie Lane has written on this topic more fully in Jane Austen and Food. I feel the essay would have been better if it had focussed on the expansion of the motherhood argument.

Piyush Mathur’s ‘The Archigenderic Territories: Mansfield Park and A Handful of Dust’ suffers from the misconception that if his writing is hard to understand he must be learned. Apparently never having heard of the KISS style of writing (Keep It Simple, Stupid), he uses sentences that are too complex and too long. Many are 80+ words and he tries to stuff too much into them. By the time you reach the end of a sentence you have forgotten what was said at the beginning. To make matters even worse, he feels the need to invent words; thus forcing the reader to remember his definitions of ‘words’ they will (hopefully) never see again while they struggle through to the end of this piece. This is the low (really low) point of this collection. All other contributions are intelligible to the lay reader, even if their audience is predominantly academic. Life is too short to waste on writers who can’t write clearly and succinctly.

In ‘We must descend a little’: Mansfield Park and the comic theatre’ Paula Byrne begins by making the point that Jane Austen was an avid theatregoer who also observed and participated in her family’s amateur theatricals at Steventon. She argues that Jane Austen does not share Fanny Price’s attitude to the Mansfield theatricals. Byrne then goes on to examine the part the theatricals play in Mansfield Park, with particular emphasis on Tom Bertram, who becomes central to the episode of the amateur dramatics. His observations of events and behaviour are the means by which many allusions to 18th century theatre are relayed to the reader. In the final part of her paper Byrne looks at the way Jane Austen has used theatrical conventions, usually by reversing or twisting them in some way. In doing so she displays her wide knowledge of plays and how they worked. It will be interesting to see if Byrne expands her theories on Austen’s use of theatrical traditions to cover all the novels (as she hints she will).

Nancy M Lee-Riffe’s ‘The Role of Country Dance in the Fiction of Jane Austen’ is another explanatory essay. An examination of the role country dance payed in rural gentry life and the conventions surrounding it leads to an increased understanding of the novels. The behaviour of people at balls and assemblies sheds light on their characters. Because it was very bad manners for a person to dance with someone other than the person they were engaged to dance with, we get an increased understanding of why Catherine Morland couldn’t dance with Henry Tilney when John Thorpe stood her up (as well as seeing how rude and thoughtless Thorpe really is). Mr Collins is another who is censured over his dancing. He can’t dance, he doesn’t know the steps of the dance and he can’t follow the rhythm of the music, yet in his overwhelming self-centeredness he insists on dancing and thereby disrupts the dance for his partner and everyone else in the set.

T A B Corley writes of Jane Austen’s ‘real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school’: Mrs La Tournelle and Mrs Goddard. After a brief look at fashionable (and expensive) female education and Jane Austen’s largely negative opinions of it, this essay turns to an examination of her own schooling and its influence on her later writing. Concentrating on her eighteen months at Mrs La Tournelle’s school at Reading Abbey, Corley gives us a look at late 18th century education for girls in the provinces by using the memoirs of another student of the school only a few years after Jane and Cassandra Austen were there. He then goes on to examine its influence on her writing. Long periods of free time gave her the opportunity to devour many works of contemporary fiction, which were put to use in the years immediately after her return to Steventon in the Juvenilia. More importantly, her memories of the school and the society she observed there are reworked to produce Mrs Goddard and her school at Highbury.

Graham Martin’s ‘Austen and Class’ is a wonderful attempt to get readers to stop thinking in terms of class when speaking of Jane Austen. Instead, we should be using her language – the language of the 18th century, the language of rank and its associated terms of order, degree and connections. While largely ignoring the growing mercantile and professional sectors of society, Austen very accurately depicts a land-based, feudal society where everyone, regardless of their rank, had duties and obligations to others in their world. Because the rest of the essay is very informative about the structure of 18th century gentry society, it is a pity that Martin makes a mistake about Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In writing of the famous exchange between Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Catherine, he claims that Lady Catherine insists Elizabeth’s rank is derived from her mother. It isn’t and, on checking Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine in fact agrees that Elizabeth is a gentleman’s daughter, even though she deplores Lizzy’s low connections on her mother’s side. If Graham Martin had been right about Lady Catherine insisting Elizabeth’s rank derived from Mrs Bennet, it could have opened up much interesting speculation about whether or not Lady Catherine was Jewish, as they trace bloodlines through females. An eclectic collection indeed.

Andrea Richards

Jane Austen and Sigmund Freud: An Interpretation

Plume Publications, 1998
by Julian Wilmot Wynne

A marriage made in Hell?

I approached the book with a certain wry detachment, predicting what I’d probably find there. I’ll admit my biases now (or some of them) up front. I usually have problems with 20th century critics reinventing literature in their own likeness. I concede that we all do it to some extent. I also concede that we are the products of our age and that means we read everything through the eyes of our own preconceptions and cultural limits. Still I baulk at what are the more obvious anachronisms - a communist analysis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alexander Pope - the literature of the disabled spring to mind. Clueless on the other hand I felt did no disservice at all to Emma - although that was an artistic interpretation not a scholarly one.

Julian Wilmot Wynne’s new Book Jane Austen and Sigmund Freud: an Interpretation is predictably enough not your usual Jane Austen literary criticism. In fact, the author claims that the entire Austen literary tradition is limited and fundamentally flawed. But it is not Jane Austen who is being psychoanalysed here. Psychoanalysis is offered as a powerful tool to use in grappling with the possible meanings of her novels.

For much of the introduction, Wynne argues directly against the objections he feels are the inevitable consequence of the work’s existence. In attempting to introduce readers (mostly re-readers) of Austen to Freud, Wynne knows that he is in grave danger of alienating all of them, so he deliberately sets out to

keep as many even potentially sympathetic Jane Austen readers as unruffled for as long as possible (Preface xi)

The central idea is that

A book is a configuration of words, not of things…All a book can do is refer. The question may then be asked: what does it refer to? The answer is that rather than refer from individual words to individual things outside the book, it works from the pattern as a whole to some other patterned thing. What thing is that? Well, because books issue from minds and are directed to minds, the contents of books are far more like the contents of mind than the contents of the world, despite the misleading ‘real’ look of the furniture. (Preface xi)

His strongest criticism is reserved for what he calls Janeism. This is almost everything that wants to refer not to Austen’s work (whilst pretending to do so) but to the person and her world. He would certainly take issue with most of the discussions at that popular Jane Austen web site, www.pemberley.com. Perhaps not, though, for it is a fan’s site, not a critical one.

Wynne is quite explicit about his purpose. He seeks to

Bring to the fore words, expressions, sometimes whole passages in Jane Austen which appear to have gone unnoticed in the critical literature. (p.xviii)

This method of proceeding is a great strength of the book but probably quite unpopular with traditional readers. It certainly arises from the critical position he takes. He believes that

any general theory of meaning in a work of literary art must begin with study of the words actually used in that work, together with an exploration of the dynamic relationship between them.

Asking what Elizabeth was good at at school would be as an irrelevant a question as asking what might Mr Darcy be thinking. All is unknowable because these are not real people. They are just words on a page and all there is is what is written about them. He has some interesting views on the changes in meaning made to the novels when they are made into pictures because the words are taken away.

What though of Freud? The first part of Chapter 1 is subtitled Sigmund Freud and Freudianism - and this, for most readers, will be pretty heavy going. In it, and its lengthy footnotes, Wynne counters criticisms of Freud and psychoanalysis. He defends Freud against accusations of sexism, of being both too vague and overly dependent on over-technical language and against sixty years of various other objections. Given that Wynne’s readers are more likely to be Janeites than Freudians, he might profitably have been more systematic in his explanation of Freud’s fundamental ideas themselves. In defending Freud he has assumed a level of knowledge of Freud which may be incompatible with someone who has already rejected psychoanalysis as useful or of someone who has never contemplated it at all.

Part 2 of Chapter 1 is Jane Austen and Janeism. This is a lively and interesting analysis of the biographist approach. It soundly rejects the position that the author’s intentions can be deduced from her characters’ actions and that her voice and those of her major characters are the same thing. Finally, it examines the peculiar, even uncanny, feeling of reality her work gives us (p36) This is more accessible and well worth a look.

The remainder of the book is devoted in a chapter each to the three novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. Wynne proceeds in a precise and detailed way. He unpacks the textual density of the novels and reveals chains of references which, surprisingly to me, I had never noticed before.

In Sense and Sensibility, Wynne points out the five times one character is expected and another character arrives and in each case it is a major male character who is not to be depended upon. He looks at the scene where Edward, after telling them of Lucy’s marriage to his brother, cuts up a sheath with the scissors.

Even the most literal of us at the end of the 20th Century sense there is something going on here beyond suppressed anger, although what, gentle reader, I leave to your imagination.

The Mansfield Park chapter is fascinating. He thinks this the finest of her novels and grapples with lots of the novel’s most interesting ideas - particularly theatricality.

The irony of Wynne’s own book is that there is much in each of the chapters devoted to the novels that is thoroughly fascinating even if the reader were to reject the central argument of the book - that psychoanalysis is a useful literary tool when reading Austen. The attention Wynne pays to text means that he finds the most wonderful patterns of word use and shows how they build to make the meanings of the novels. We may make a different meaning from the same patterns (may feel more comfortable he might say) but there’s no denying their existence.

This is not a book to read from beginning to end but it is one well worth returning to again and again. Despite myself and my continued unease with the final meanings that Wynne draws, I am really glad I read it.

Reviewed by Denise Harris

Letters from Pemberley

Chicken Soup Press, 1999
by Jane Dawkins

In this continuation of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth is married, and while she is blissfully happy with Darcy at Pemberley, she misses her sister Jane rather badly. Naturally she writes letters to her almost every week. Ms Dawkins has thoughtfully supplied Jane Austen fans with these letters, to give further insights into the life of one of our favourite characters.

Rather than advance the plot in radical directions, Ms Dawkins has sensibly ventured only to oversee the redesigning of the house and gardens, to bless several marriages with child, to hold a ball at Pemberley and to add the mystery of another romance in the family. The letters are written in a flowing style, keeping to the overall spirit of the original. So far so good.

To add a little spice, Ms Dawkins offers what she calls a ‘patchwork’ of characters recycled from Jane Austen’s other novels. These somewhat disorientated folk make up the neighbouring families to whom Elizabeth is introduced. I say disorientated, for not only have they been transported geographically, they also suffer more than their fair share of identity crises. Anne Elliot is now known as Eleanor Steventon, while Elinor Dashwood rejoices in the name of Anna Norland, and her sister Marianne becomes Fanny. The insufferable Mrs Elton, with a good eye for property, has adopted the name of the Weston estate, and is known as Mrs Randall. Sir John Middleton likewise is now Sir Richard Mansfield. This author’s sense of humour can further be appreciated from her idea of word play on names, with Mr Knightley recast as Mr Daley. I am probably difficult to please, but I found this distracting rather than amusing.

I could happily indulge any amount of word play if the book had a spark of the Austen wit to recommend it as a ‘sequel’. It seems to me, however, to be lacking in subtlety. Elizabeth writes to Jane of Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst:

Their manners towards me, not surprisingly, are much improved in civility, if not in sincerity … Full of false sincerity, they took their leave after half an hour.

She also writes:

Having given birth to one sickly specimen herself, I dare say Lady Catherine de Bourgh has as much in the way of excellent advice to offer on the subject of children as on any other.

This is overstated, and certainly not the voice of a woman whose spirit, humour and wit bewitches Darcy.

We rejoice in Elizabeth’s marriage to Darcy precisely because we feel she is his match in complexity of character, his equal in interests and intelligence. This Elizabeth is rather clumsy and pale in comparison, and steps out of character too often. She makes Georgiana cry; she recounts intimate conversations between herself and Darcy. She is almost gushy in her letters to Jane, forever praising her ‘sweet nature’ in contrast to her own. She is in raptures over yellow silk and matching gloves, but is ‘bewildered’ by discussions with Repton on modern landscaping. Her ‘teasing’ of Darcy amounts to saying that the portrait painter Raeburn may not wish to capture only a ‘tolerable’ beauty such as her own. This joke is repeated later for readers who did not catch it the first time.

If the characterisation is less than convincing, perhaps there are other redeeming features. It is all fairly harmless, and, as our President describes, is ‘a pleasant and believable story’. It is true to its historical context, shows evidence of some research, and follows the scenario of Jane Austen’s closing chapter faithfully. I am sure it would make a welcome diversion from more mundane Saturday afternoon duties.

Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but I prefer a little more originality mixed with it! Ms Dawkins makes Elizabeth comment on Miss Anna Norland: ‘I do not perceive wit or genius’. My thoughts exactly.

Reviewed by Sue Lack

Lackington Allen & Co, booksellers, Finsbury Square, was 'one of the curiosities of the metropolis ... on account of the vast extent of its premises, and of the immense stock of books'.

From Ackermann, R: The Repository of arts. literature, commerce, manufactures, fashion and politics (1809 - 28).

29 January 2004

FEEDBACK: info@jasa.net.au

HOME | What's New | About Jane | About JASA | JASA News | Sensibilities | Calendar | Conference | Book Reviews |  JASA Library | Writing Competition | Mrs Goddard's School | Regency Fair | LINKS