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The Jane Austen Society of Australia << Back to Sensibilities: Index of articles
Extracts from Sensibilities
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In the Footsteps of Fanny Price
Fanny Price, even more than most of Jane Austen’s other heroines, doesn’t travel very far. Since the publication of Jon Spence’s edition of Jane Austen’s Brother Abroad: The Grand Tour Journals of Edward Austen – a handsome little volume, for which this Society and Helen Malcher must take credit – we’ve become more aware of the significance of travel in the novels. And of how much travel, and especially travel abroad, was, in Jane Austen’s period, and in her novels, a male prerogative. You may remember, for instance, how, in the wake of the disagreements with Jane before, and during, the Box Hill picnic, Frank Churchill suddenly announces that he is going ‘abroad’, and that, on that same occasion, Mr Woodhouse is entertained with pictures of St Mark’s Venice and other tourist sites in Italy. This suggests perhaps that one of the Knightleys (though probably not George), like Jane Austen’s brother, made the Grand Tour. And in Mansfield Park, after the shut-down of the theatricals, Henry Crawford says if there is any renewal of the scheme, he will come back, saying ‘From Bath, Norfolk, London, York – wherever I may be … I will attend you from any place in England, at an hour’s notice.’ (II, 2). Such grand freedom to range the length and breadth of the country does not belong even to his sister, Mary, who must wait at the Parsonage for him to turn up to escort her home... ... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Postcolonial Jane???
Some might find a strange yoking in the title for this paper: I’ve joined a highly politicised method of reading literature to that affectionate term ‘Jane’ – the shy spinster ‘Jane’ of popular myth, sequestered in Hampshire, with the odd trip to Bath, hiding her manuscripts under the blotter when anyone enters the room. How could that ‘Jane’ lend herself to readings of her novels that are concerned with something termed ‘postcolonial’? I want to discuss here how this has come about, which seems particularly fitting given that the entire critical industry of postcolonial Austen has seeded itself from Mansfield Park. Austen’s novels have long been read through the prism of historical, cultural, and political analysis, but ‘postcolonial’ reading is a relatively new field. One beginning (for many the beginning) is to be found in Edward Said’s monumental Orientalism, published in 1978: Said analysed the way in which 18th and 19th century European culture, in his terms, ‘discovered, invented, and sought to control’ the Orient – his analyses of imperial adventure proved fundamental for the work of those who followed him... ... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Tradition and the Individual Talent: Jane Austen and Mansfield Park
My title refers to T.S. Eliot’s essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1920), required reading when I was a graduate student in the 1960s, when Eliot was the high priest of literature. His point in that essay was that no writer (he was talking about poets but the insight applies I think even more strongly to novelists) can avoid confronting tradition and, indeed, by the very effort to innovate or to separate him or herself from the tradition, the writer winds up affirming its presence and even transforming it, if he or she is good enough. If you change the gender of the pronouns, what Eliot says about a writer’s relationship to the past is an important part of my subject today: No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, is the application of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.’1 As Eliot went on to add, a new and successful work alters our understanding of the tradition, and paradoxically the present influences the past: after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.’2 Jane Austen formed herself on the great 18th century English novelists, and as you will all know the title of her best known novel, Pride and Prejudice, echoes a passage at the end of Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782). Austen’s work looks back, in what we can now appreciate as a unique synthesis, to the narrative techniques elaborated by Fielding and Richardson, and in its brilliance enhances our sense of what those novelists accomplished – alters, as Eliot puts it, the tradition out of which she sprang. My effort today is to remind us of the link between the Austen of Mansfield Park and that tradition, and in the process to explore how in that novel especially she achieves an originality that expands that tradition and opens up what is latent or undeveloped in it...... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Does Fanny ‘Make’ the Place or Does the Place ‘Make’ Fanny?
(Appleton 270) The 1996 Miramax film version of Emma opens in outer space, hurling the viewer towards Earth, moving in on Europe, then closer to England, and finally focusing on Highbury, the centre of the Universe. With this opening, the filmmakers suggest the significant relationship between geography and Emma. Highbury is the centre of the Universe for Emma – and for just about everyone else in the novel. The characters can hardly move outside of it (and its satellite estates) without something unsettling happening to them. In many ways, Mansfield Park shares a similar position in Austen’s novel of the same name. Although a large estate, instead of a village aspiring to become a town, Mansfield Park also acts as the centre of the Universe for its main characters, and those moving outside its confinements find themselves in a virtual state of exile. They are always brought back, in memory at least, to that centre of the Universe, ‘a description of the people, the manners, the amusements, the ways of Mansfield Park’ (419) ...... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Pug
In 1693 the Quaker William Penn wrote ‘Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children’ 1. This could well be true of the Bertram family! But how careful was Jane Austen when she chose a breed of dog for Lady Bertram of Mansfield Park? Why a pug? What does this dog tell us about Lady Bertram, her children and her income? When I became the owner of a pug, Cassie (full name Cassandra Mansfield Bertram Fullerton), I looked at Lady Bertram’s little dog with new interest and, aware that Jane Austen chose every word in her novels deliberately and carefully, I knew that she must have had her reasons for selecting that particular breed.To begin with a brief history of the pug… ... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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The Importance of Being Edmund: names in Mansfield Park
Was Jane Austen ever in thrall to the magic of names? Surely not: Charles, Edward, Henry and James, like Anne, Elizabeth and Mary – ‘all the Marys and Elizabeths’ of the Elliot ancestry in Persuasion – designate the main characters of her novels, as freely as they were employed among her family and acquaintances. 1 Nothing in particular attaches to a first name in Jane Austen: an Anne can be a vulgar schemer or a figure of exemplary sensibility and self-control; an Elizabeth can be the scintillating heroine of one novel and a cold, arrogant sister in another. A Henry can be a hero or a villain. Pretentious characters are sometimes given fashionable or unusual names like Penelope or Augusta, but little seems to be aimed at in the naming of the principal characters beyond a neutral and general representation of customary English practice. And these are usually the names of English Kings and Queens.But there is one novel in which names, especially first names, may have special significance: Mansfield Park... ... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Portsmouth: Confinement and Escape
—Samuel Johnson (Boswell 19 Vol. ii chap. iii) Significant Events for Portsmouth during Jane Austen’s
Life: - - - - - - Portsmouth occupied Jane Austen’s mind for much of her adult life, given that two of her brothers pursued careers in the navy. I always assumed that Jane Austen had been to Portsmouth, probably many times, but, to my surprise, no letter from Portsmouth exists. Neither are there any accounts from the family indicating that she had actually been there, although Jane Austen: A Family Record suggests that the Austens, including Cassandra and Jane, may have visited there in July 1791, when her younger brother, Charles, entered the Royal Naval Academy. Portsmouth may have seemed a prison for Fanny (certainly it was intended as such by Sir Thomas), but it was also a place from which many escaped in search of fortune, as in the case of William Price and of boys like Francis and Charles Austen, who entered the Naval Academy at ages eleven and twelve respectively, returning again and again to Portsmouth as they performed their duties for the Royal Navy. Eventually, I believe, Jane Austen saw Portsmouth as a place from which women might escape as well – if we believe that Anne Elliot might eventually join her husband on a man of war. In the context of Mansfield Park, Portsmouth was an amalgam of confinement and escape for Fanny... ... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Fanny Price - by Charlotte Brontë
It was a drear November day when I arrived at Mansfield Park – a poor, friendless girl brought there as companion to my cousins, Maria and Julia Bertram, whom I quickly dismissed as pert, preening, and unprincipled girls. Their mother’s beauty, which I could never bring myself to admire, had secured Sir Thomas Bertram, whilst my mother’s less dazzling accomplishments had netted a Lieutenant of Marines and determined a life of interminable child-bearing in Portsmouth. Their sister, Mrs Norris, lived at Mansfield: a woman of over-bearing and unwarranted self-importance, she made herself my enemy, little knowing that in the small, plain Fanny Price she had met her match. The Bertram brothers I soon discovered were unworthy of my notice: Edmund was a priggish moralising bore and Tom a rude and nasty bully. As the years went by, the East room became my refuge, and there, often shivering for want of a fire, I would warm my chilblained hands by the candlelight, reading late into the night the sermons of Jeremy Taylor, the political speeches of Edmund Burke, and the uplifting works of Hannah More. The subject of the abominable slave trade was my particular interest, despite the dreadful silence that descended upon the drawing-room when I declared that the rights of impoverished, small, female cousins were as important as those of our enslaved black brothers. I knew that no one would care for Fanny Price but herself... ... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Georgette Heyer and the Great Jane
In May 1970 Georgette Heyer wrote to her agent, Joyce Weiner, to tell her of a letter she had just received from an adoring fan who had written effusively to Heyer to tell her that my books had induced her to overcome her dislike of ‘the classics’, and that she had just succeeded in ‘wading thru’ Pride and Prejudice. Her rating of this masterpiece was that it was a Heyer book ‘with a lot of unnecessary padding.’ I don’t know what else she had to say, for at that point I tore the letter up.1 Heyer’s reaction to her correspondent’s extraordinary statement neatly encapsulates not only her lifelong admiration and appreciation of Jane Austen’s literary legacy, but also her intolerance of any fan foolish enough to suggest that she could in any way be the equal of, let alone superior to, the woman deemed one of the greatest of all English writers. Jane Austen was Georgette Heyer’s favourite author and Austen’s six novels her choice of literature should she have ever had the misfortune to be marooned on a desert island. A close reading of Heyer’s own novels reveals many moments where she pays homage to the ‘Great Jane’ through her use of Austenesque humour, witty dialogue, town and country settings and characters whose personality and behaviour frequently show them to be literary descendants of some of Austen’s greatest creations.· ... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Along the Autistic Spectrum in Pride and Prejudice
Most people, when reading this title, furrow their brows and ask what possible connection there could be between autism and a novel by Jane Austen. A quick Google search produces 30,300,000 references to autism and 7,360,000 to Jane Austen; however, if both are typed in together the response is that the combination does ‘not match any documents’. However, the connection does exist. As we know Jane Austen observed, described and created people with skill and accuracy. Although the term ‘autism’ was not used until the 1940s, people with autistic characteristics have always existed so she included them in the rich variety of people who inhabit her novels. There they have puzzled and intrigued us for two centuries just as do the undiagnosed, mildly autistic people whom we sometimes meet in our daily lives... ... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Critical Relationships: Sense & Sensibility on Page & Screen
Discussions surrounding the definition and application of theories of cinematic adaptation – specifically, of ‘faithful’ adaptation – have persisted as a minor field within Austen studies since Hollywood’s increased interest in her from the 1990s onwards. The 2003 publication of Jane Austen on Screen 1 drew many of these discussions together but despite this, and the release of two further adaptations of Pride and Prejudice2 in the years since, Austen critics remain largely silent on the issue. In her 2001 Sensibilities paper ‘Making Sense: Jane Austen on the Screen’, Yasmine Gooneratne concluded that ‘film versions of Jane Austen’s novels certainly have many good points, but even the best of them are, in the end, no substitute for the fiction… One good thing that can be said for (them) is that the best among them lead people back to the novels’.3 This remark is important given it assumes a consensus not only on the primacy of Austen’s novels over their cinematic counterparts but also on which of the latter are the ‘best’. Gooneratne’s remark also assumes that, rather than producing an autonomous film, the adaptors of Austen novels propose, if not to ‘substitute’, at least to represent them as ‘faithfully’ as possible. The confidence with which Gooneratne’s remark is delivered suggests her own – and perhaps many critics’ – resistance to exploring the complexities in our conceptions of fidelity in adaptation...... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Annette Upfal: Jane Austen’s health and final illness
In the above article, subtitled New evidence points to a fatal Hodgkin’s disease and excludes the widely accepted Addison’s, 1 Annette Upfal proposes that Jane Austen’s final illness was the concluding episode in a life of chronic illness. Upfal suggests Jane Austen suffered ‘unusually severe and debilitating illnesses, and was particularly susceptible to infection … this was not a case of a healthy person suddenly struck down with a fatal illness.’2 She postulates that Jane Austen’s ‘medical history of both unusually severe infections and chronic infection is consistent with an immune disorder’3 and concludes ‘Jane Austen’s biographers have seriously underestimated the extent to which illness affected her, throughout her life…’4Establishing the medical history and the cause of death of historical figures is a minefield. Contemporary comments on Jane Austen’s final illness include unfamiliar medical concepts, and modern pathology and imaging investigations were not available. We will probably never know whether Jane Austen died of Addison’s disease, Hodgkin’s disease or some other disease, and Upfal does add a new idea with her conclusion that Jane Austen suffered chronic ill-health throughout her life. However, her arguments are not persuasive... ... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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