The Jane Austen Society of Australia

Sensibilities

Extracts from Sensibilities
December 2001

• ‘She learned romance as she grew older': Persuasion as the 'natural sequel' to Sense & Sensibility - Hugh Craig
• 'You have delighted us long enough' – Art & Artifice in Jane Austen's Singers - Janet Rutledge
• Sewing the Seams of the Novel: Needlework and Clothes in the Life and Writings of Jane Austen - Andrea Richards

JASA 2001 Conference papers
Theme: Jane Austen & Love

• ‘The Doctor is In’: How Jane Austen’s Lovers Go from Boys to Men to Boys - Joan Klingel Ray
• Jane Austen and Adultery - Susannah Fullerton
• Falling in Love with Jane: The Pleasures and Problems of being an Austen Fan In Australia - Brigid Rooney

‘She learned romance as she grew older': Persuasion as the 'natural sequel' to Sense & Sensibility

Hugh Craig is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Newcastle. He has taught Jane Austen to many groups of students, and is planning a book on questions of gender raised by her work.

I want to explore a comparison between two Jane Austen novels, emphasising the range of her work and the extent of the development across her writing career. Sometimes Austen readers concentrate too much on a collective or composite Austen, it seems to me, as if there was really only one Austen story or Austen world spread over a number of episodes. I will talk about Persuasion, a late novel, in relation to Sense and Sensibility, an early work. I want to argue that the two are neatly contrasting in many ways, almost as if (as my title suggests) Persuasion is a sequel to Sense and Sensibility. More generally, I want to use Sense and Sensibility as a benchmark to measure the achievement of the later novel.

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'You have delighted us long enough' - Art & Artifice in Jane Austen's Singers

Janet Rutledge has been a singer, singing teacher, adjudicator and examiner through-out 40 years of professional life. It is only recently, as a member of JASA, that she has turned her undoubted analytical skills to the Austen ‘canon’.

I would like to begin with a brief background to my interest in the subject of today’s talk, Art and Artifice in Jane Austen’s Singers. Growing up in a large, musically gifted family in an Australian country town at a blissfully unsophisticated time when steam radio and ‘Sat’dy arvo at the pitchers’ were the main outside entertainment for children, I regarded the now, alas, disappeared pleasure of ‘singing around the piano’ as natural as eating three hearty meals a day. With 18 uncles and aunts and their respective spouses, one sister, two brothers and 58 first cousins, one never felt odd-man-out performing at the frequent family gatherings. Art? Artifice? We would not have known what the words meant at that time. Learning music was a natural part of one’s basic education, and we played and sang for fun. I suspect such a background has a familiar resonance with many of you.

For me it laid a firm foundation for a subsequent professional career as a singer, singing teacher, adjudicator and examiner. So after 40 years of listening to and observing singers, I suppose it is inevitable one would develop a sharp eye and ear for the difference between art and artifice, but I have to confess that in actual fact, it was not until re-reading Jane Austen’s novels more closely and critically that all sorts of unsuspected dimensions to the topic began to reveal themselves.

The novels are generously graced by many musical practitioners of varying abilities, not to mention self-appointed non-performing critics of the likes of Lady Catherine de Bourgh who is in no doubt whatever about her right to pass judgement: ‘If I had ever learnt, I would have been a great proficient.’ She is, of course, the absolute personification of artifice, and we laugh at her with the relish which I am sure Jane Austen intends. But in fact, this is only a surface reaction.

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Sewing the Seams of the Novel: Needlework and Clothes in the Life and Writings of Jane Austen

Andrea Richards of the Jane Austen Society in Melbourne, has already demonstrated in talks to our Society, her broad expertise in matters relating to sewing in the Austen period. Here she expands further to see Austen herself as ‘sewing’, repairing and altering her writing.

Jane Austen spent much of her time sewing, partly from necessity, because of her family’s expectations, her obligations to society and for her own personal enjoyment. Some of her needlework was an attempt to keep up with fashion, some was for her family and much was an act of charity. Her skill with her needle and her interest in dress were important parts of her life; they also played a part both in how she wrote and what she wrote. Needlework was also an outlet for her creativity which did not break the bounds of feminine propriety; it gave her time to explore ideas for her writing while being ‘gainfully’ employed and, above all, a shield behind which she could observe society.

In contrast to her fictional heroines, Jane Austen’s letters show a great interest in clothes and she obviously used her needle to extend the life of at least some of them but this resorting to economies may have only been acknowledged to Cassandra. In public she did not want either herself or members of her family to be seen to engage in ‘vulgar economies’.

... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.

‘The Doctor is In’: How Jane Austen’s Lovers Go from Boys to Men to Boys

Joan Klingel Ray became President of JASNA (the Jane Austen Society of North America) in October 2000, the first professional academic to hold this position. A Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Joan feels she is extremely lucky to have her vocation and avocation blend in the form of teaching whole courses about her favourite writer, Jane Austen. In 1999, Joan co-ordinated JASNA's AGM in Colorado Springs, ‘Emma: Austen at her peak’. In addition to Austen, Joan has published on Dickens, Herbert, Dr Johnson, Hawthorne, Mrs Thrale Piozzi, and Camus. In 1994, she was awarded the lifetime title of University of Colorado President's Teaching Scholar. Her PhD is from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She is a fifth generation New Yorker.

Among the many reasons for Jane Austen’s universal and long-lasting popularity as a novelist, her wonderful narrative voice probably ranks first. But coming in as a close second is her uncanny knowledge of human nature. Her insight into human behavior comes across so clearly in the characters she presents that we readers regularly find ourselves nodding our heads, as if to say, ‘Yes, I know someone just like that.’ On this score, we might say that Austen created characters who are psychologically realistic, whose behavior rings true to what we observe about people in our own day and age. Even characters like Lucy Steele or Aunt Norris, who are among Austen’s more villainous creations, never reach grotesque proportions; they remain within the parameters of human probability even as they show some aberrations from what you or I – and I speak for myself, here, as an ‘amateur psychologist’ – might optimistically deem the ‘norm.’ Thus, Lucy demonstrates passive aggressive behavior towards Elinor Dashwood, while Aunt Norris is, in modern parlance, a control freak. Indeed, from this perspective, we see that Austen had not only great psychological insight, but, given that she was creating these characters in the late 1790s and the first two decades of the 1800s, great psychological foresight.

In fact, one of my little quirky indulgences with Austen involves occasionally consulting a psychology textbook with Austen’s characters in mind.

... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.

Jane Austen and Adultery

Susannah Fullerton has been President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia for the past five years, during which time she has also worked as a freelance literary lecturer, giving talks on famous writers and their works at WEA, the State Library of NSW, ADFAS, and for a variety of clubs and community groups. Susannah is also a member of the Australian Brontė Association, The Byron Society, and the Dylan Thomas Society of Australia. In co-operation with Anne Harbers she is publishing, in December 2001, Jane Austen: Antipodean Views, and is also working on a book on Jane Austen and crime.

‘I am proud to say that I have a very good eye at an Adultress’ boasted Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra in May 18011. There is nothing immodest about the boast – Jane Austen did have an excellent eye ‘at an Adultress’. What is surprising is that she appears to make the boast with a sense of discovery, as if she had only just noticed this remarkable talent within herself! Surely the author of the juvenilia and Lady Susan must have known before this time that she possessed such an eye? Throughout most of her life Jane Austen appears to have enjoyed spotting those guilty of adultery, discussing the ‘crime’ with her sister and depicting its awful results in her fiction.

Jane Austen’s lifetime coincided with what was to become known as the Age of Scandal. No citizen of the Regency Age could have remained unaware of the adulterous relationships of the royals, the peers and peeresses of the realm, admirals as famous as Lord Nelson himself, society hostesses and politicians. Clergymen might preach fidelity and morality from the pulpit, but when the highest in the land were openly parading their mistresses and illegitimate children it is hardly surprising that the parson’s advice was frequently ignored by those further down the social scale.

... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.

Falling in Love with Jane: The Pleasures and Problems of being an Austen Fan In Australia

Dr Brigid Rooney is currently a post doctoral research fellow in English at the University of Sydney. Like many of her peers, Brigid fell in love with Jane Austen at the age of about 14 through her encounter with Pride and Prejudice: Later Mansfield Park became a firm favourite. After a decade spent teaching secondary English, Brigid began postgraduate study at Macquarie University. Her doctoral thesis studied the politics and writings of Australian novelist Christina Stead, about whom she has published several essays, and she has recently begun a new project on contemporary Australian writers as public intellectuals.

This paper is a meditation arising from my own encounter with Jane Austen’s fiction, primarily attempting to grapple with why I now feel ambivalent about responding to Austen’s wonderful books at this stage in my life. I hope this approach will allow me to explore the problems as well as the pleasures of being simultaneously a Jane Austen fan and a contemporary white Australian woman.

I believe that I can no longer separate my love of Jane Austen from my personal history and identity as an ex-secondary school English teacher belatedly turned academic – a feminist, a sympathiser with Aboriginal politics and a suburban Sydney mother of two young boys. Jane Austen and her books are thoroughly integral to who I am.

In Part 1, I will investigate the problem of ambivalence in tracing my journey from Jane Austen fan to academic critic. Part 2 will touch upon the history of reading Jane Austen in the Antipodes, and will suggest some related issues. Part 3’s review of the Mansfield Park film debate will ground my previous discussion before some concluding challenges for contemporary readers of Austen in the antipodes.

... and to read more, join JASA and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.

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01 January 2003

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