The Jane Austen Society of Australia

Extracts from Sensibilities
December 2000

These extracts are from JASA's twice-yearly journal, Sensibilities, which, like all JASA publications, is sent free to JASA members.

Most past issues of Sensibilities can be purchased for A$6.00 each. See the Sensibilities list of articles.

'The Will of Theophilus Leigh'
~ Full Transcript, Introduced and Transcribed by Dr Jon Spence

The will of Theophilus Leigh (c.1643-1725) of Adlestrop Park (not to be confused with his son Theopilus Leigh (1693-1784), Master of Balliol, Oxford),  maternal great-grandfather of Jane Austen, introduces names and alludes to situations in Austen's family history that have hardly - if at all - been touched on by biographers. I suspect most readers have assumed, like myself, that this lacuna was owing to lack of available information about the Leigh family. This is not the case. It seems the patriarchal view is so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that we take for granted that Jane Austen was more an Austen than a Leigh. The time is long overdue to confront this misconception, and the publication of Theophilus Leigh's will provides a good start for an examination of the maternal line of Jane Austen's family history.

Theophilus Leigh married twice and had surviving children from both marriages. He first married in 1673 Elizabeth Craven (1646-c1688), the daughter of Sir William Craven of Lenchwick in Worcestershire and Elizabeth Fairfax, daughter of Ferdinand Fairfax, Lord Cameron.

Theophilus and Elizabeth had only one surviving child, a daughter named Tryphena (1678-c1746). Tryphena inherited an independent fortune from her mother, so her father only bequeathed her the pictures and silver of her grandmother Craven and a token sum of £20 for her mourning clothes.

The Leigh family history1 implies that Tryphena never married, but records show that a Tryphena Leigh married John Wood at Kingston, Hampshire in 1733, so there may be more to Tryphena's story yet to be revealed.

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'Jane Austen and Sport'
~ Amanda Jones

In this year of the Olympics, a paper delivered to the JASA June meeting

During the morning (or the day, as we would call it), men and women largely pursued their occupations and interests separately. After breakfast men went out, to the woods (to shoot), or the fields (to hunt), or the streams (to fish). They generally picnicked in the fields, and then came together with the women for dinner. After dinner and the separation of the sexes, there would be coffee or tea, and perhaps billiards (Poole 1993:83). I won't be covering billiards in any greater depth, as I am concentrating on outdoor pursuits, but it was the chief of indoor amusements for men. Always popular, it had enjoyed a revival at the turn of the century - an advertisement in the Morning Post in 1809 read 'billiards are become very fashionable; it is an amusement of a gentlemanly cast, giving at once activity to the limbs and grace to the person' (Craik 1969:27). Jane Austen writes in a letter 'the comfort of the Billiard Table here is very great. - It draws all the Gentlemen to it whenever they are within, especially after dinner, so that my brother, Fanny and I have the Library to ourselves in delightful quiet' (le Faye 1997:239). In the novels, we read of Mr Palmer's idling away his time at billiards, John Thorpe boasts of 'making one of the cleanest strokes that was perhaps ever made in this world' (NA ch 12), and the site of the disastrous Mansfield theatricals is in the billiard room. In filmed versions, there is a shot of a smoulderingly passionate Mr Darcy forcefully sinking a ball after Elizabeth has disturbed him by mistakenly entering the billiard room, and in the recent film of Mansfield Park, we see Mary Crawford playing with the men, although I'm not sure how historically accurate this is.

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'James Stanier Clarke and Jane Austen'
~ Richard James Wheeler

Richard Wheeler is the biographer of Clarke, as well as the author of James Stanier Clarke and his Watercolour Portrait of Jane Austen, and The Rice Portrait of Jane Austen.

James Stanier Clarke was the Prince Regent's Librarian at Carlton House, whose enthusiastic contact with Jane Austen in 1815 and 1816 has caused some Austen biographers to label him something of a 'Mr Collins'. Her original biographer James Edward Austen Leigh however said in 1865 that 'Jane found Mr Clarke not only a very courteous gentleman but also a very warm admirer of her talents.' His background deserves examination.

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'In Search of Elegance'
~ Yvette Field

The focus of this talk is not the elegance of Miss Jane Austen's prose, nor the pleasing neo-classical lines of the late Georgian period; it is simply on the word 'elegance' and how Jane Austen uses it. I was determined to start with 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat'! However tortuous the path from Edward Lear towards a key word in Jane Austen, it had to be so. This then reminded me of an old academic joke about tangential beginnings: a traveller stops a country man to ask his way to a destination. The man puzzles a while then slowly shaking his head says 'Arrgh, you don't start from here, if you want to get to there'. Yes, I do want to go to there, but I will start like this:
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea (you will remember)

In a beautiful pea green boat

taking honey and money and also a small guitar on which the owl accompanies herself as she sweetly sings:

Oh lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,

with a heartfelt refrain. Then, in the second stanza come the lines which you all realise are my object:

Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
Oh let us be married! Too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?'

The comic juxtaposition of 'elegant' referring to a fowl has made this line justly famous, probably the most famous line using a variant of 'elegance' in English literature. 

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'Eating and Entertaining with Elegance'
~ Maggie Lane

As late as 1787, when Jane Austen was twelve, a book was written by the Reverend John Trusler called The Honours of the Table for the Use of Young People, in which he found it necessary to advise against indulging in any of the following activities during dinner: scratching, spitting, nose-blowing, teeth-picking, leaving the table in an obtrusive fashion 'from any necessity of nature' or advertising what one had been doing by adjusting the dress on returning to the room. None of Jane Austen's characters, however ill-bred, has such disgusting table manners as these, but the fact that there was a need for such advice so late in the 18th century shows that elegance was not something that could be taken for granted even among the literate levels of society.

Originating in London and Bath, and always at its most extreme there, polite behaviour was not just a matter of empty ceremony, it was a necessity when people began to spend their leisure hours in close proximity to one another. The polish acquired in these two fashionable centres was carried back and disseminated among the country gentry, as well as taught in conduct books such as that just referred to. Of Jane Austen's characters, nobody is arraigned for actual shortcomings in their table manners except the Price family. The Portsmouth scenes in Mansfield Park are like no other in the body of Jane Austen's work. In these scenes she allows us to glimpse - and proves that she herself is aware of - the levels in society only a little below her own, in which elegant behaviour cannot be taken for granted. 

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'Not so refined as she ought to have been': Was JaneAusten Elegant?
~ Douglas Murray

My title derives from the famous - yea, even infamous - letter about Jane Austen written by her favourite niece Fanny, the eldest child of Edward Austen Knight and later the wife of Sir Edward Knatchbull. This letter, now owned by Mr Henry Rice, was written to one of Fanny's sisters in August of 1869. A half century had transformed the young girl whom Austen called 'inimitable, irresistible,...the delight of my life' (Letters, ed. LeFaye, 20 February 1817, p.328) into the Dowager Lady Knatchbull. In that letter, Fanny notoriously wrote: 

Yes my love it is very true that Aunt Jane from various circumstances was not so refined as she ought to have been for her talent, & if she had lived 50 years later she would have been in many respects more suitable to our more refined tastes. They were not rich, & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they [that is, the Austens] of course though superior in 
mental powers & cultivation were on the same level so far as refinement goes - but I think in later life their intercourse with Mrs Knight [who adopted Edward Austen]... improved them both & Aunt Jane was too clever not to put aside all possible signs of 'common-ness' (if such an expression is allowable) & teach herself to be more refined, at least in intercourse with people in general. Both the Aunts (Cassandra & Jane) were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashions &c) & if it had not been for Papa's marriage which brought them into Kent, & the kindness of Mrs Knight, who used often to have one or the other of the sisters staying with her, they would have been, tho' not less clever & agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good society & its ways. 
(Almost Another Sister, 110-111)

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Jane Austen and the Spectacles of Life
~ Douglas Murray

We all know the power of the human eye. We have all met those whose glances rouse fear - or at least incur immobility - and most of us probably know those whom our own glances can disconcert. We all know how the fear of an unseen spectator can alter behaviour, a fear American parents appropriate when they remind unruly young children that Santa Claus is coming to town: Santa, that all-seeing figure who mysteriously knows when boys and girls have been naughty or nice.

Jane Austen would hardly have been surprised by the power of such real or imagined eyes, nor would she have been surprised by the late-20th century interest in the gaze: that is, in investigations of the ways in which men and women see, are seen, and respond to being seen. It is the thesis of this presentation that an understanding of theorists of the gaze can enrich our reading of Austen - and our admiration for her, since her fiction anticipates much 20th century writing on the subject, in particular that of Laura Mulvey and Michel Foucault.

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Bath: the Epitome of Elegance?
~ Maggie Lane

Today, if one were to advise a visitor where to go to see England at its most elegant, I think most people would suggest the Georgian and Regency spa towns and seaside resorts: Bath, Cheltenham, Buxton, Brighton, Sidmouth and so on. Their elegance consists these days not of course in the way people carry on their lives there, which is much the same as anywhere else, but in the built environment. The terraces, crescents and squares of flat-fronted, symmetrical houses, seem even to the modern eye to be the embodiment of elegance, if the components of elegance are proportion, restraint, and good manners. Of all the places I have mentioned, Bath is supreme; the earliest developed, the largest, and the most complete. It was unique in its day; the others copied and evolved from it, sometimes adding playful details like wrought iron balconies and Gothick window shapes that Bath itself is largely without. The architecture of Bath is the most pure, the most consistently Palladian, perhaps of any city in the world. No wonder it is a World Heritage Site. Unified by the same building material, the local honey-coloured stone, which links the grandest building schemes to the humblest artisan's terraces, and set like a golden jewel in its surrounding green hills, Bath appeals both to our aesthetic and historic sensibilities. To walk its pavements is to feel oneself transported to a more elegant age.

I would like here to consider why and how all this elegance came about; whether such elegance was always only skin-deep; whether and why it declined or changed during Jane Austen's lifetime; and that perennial puzzle, why Jane Austen, an admirer of everything elegant, did not have a higher regard for Bath. 

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28 December 2000

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