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The Jane Austen Society of Australia
Extracts from Sensibilities
June 2001
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.
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The Will of William Austen and Introduction
~ Full Transcript, Introduced and Transcribed by Dr Jon Spence
William Austen was one of the grandchildren virtually disinherited by
John Austen of Horsmonden. He was apprenticed to a surgeon and at the time he made his
Will in 1735 was practicing in Tonbridge, Kent. In 1727 he married Rebecca Hampson,
daughter of Sir George Hampson, Bt., and they had four children before she died soon after
the birth of the fourth in 1732. Their first child, a daughter Hampson, died before her
mother.
William Austen’s Will shows that he was influenced by his mother,
Elizabeth Weller. Like her he believed that education was of immense importance, and he
stipulated that his money be used to educate his son George and two daughters Philadelphia
and Leonora. William held a strict principle of equality unusual for the time. He wanted
his property to be divided equally: the younger were to get exactly the same as the
eldest; the girls exactly the same as the boy. No other Will in this series has such a
stipulation. It was a radical idea, one undoubtedly prompted by the injustice of his
grandfather’s Will. William was so determined that the equal division be carried out
justly that he ordered the property to be sold before the division so that there could be
no doubt as to the equality of each portion.
... and to read more, join JASA
and receive your twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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The Will of Stephen Austen and Introduction
~ Full Transcript, Introduced and Transcribed by Dr Jon Spence
When Stephen Austen’s
brother William died in 1737, Stephen, a bookseller in London, and his wife provided a
home for William’s three orphaned children. By the time Stephen made his Will in
1745, his brother Francis had apparently taken over the full care of their nephew George,
but the nieces Philadelphia and Leonora had remained with Stephen and his wife, Elizabeth.
Stephen’s Will suggests that the family expected (or he thought
they expected) him to leave something to his nieces (whom I take it he refers to as
‘several Relations’ in his Will). He however bequeaths his whole estate to his
wife, and he includes an apologetic explanation as to why he did. He also insists that his
wife had not influenced him in his decision.
One of the most interesting aspects of Stephen’s short Will is
that one of the men who swore to the authenticity of the handwriting in the document was
John Hinton, a bookseller who married Stephen’s widow before the year was out. This
began a strange horizontal line of connections in which William Austen’s daughter
Leonora seems to have been the constant factor. After Stephen died, his widow and her new
husband, John Hinton, gave Leonora a home. When the Widow Austen died, Leonora continued
to live with Hinton and his second wife. When Hinton himself died, his widow married yet
another bookseller who was named Stephen Austen Cumberlege, assumed to be a godson of
Stephen Austen. Leonora spent the rest of her life with the Cumberlege family. In short,
after the death of her father, Leonora Austen spent her life in London in the homes of
booksellers who had a habit of marrying each other’s widows!
... and to read more, join JASA and receive your
twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Making Sense: Jane Austen on the Screen
~ Yasmine Gooneratne
Tai and I don’t make sense. You and I make sense.
I thank you; but I assure you you are quite mistaken. Mr Elton and I are very good
friends, and nothing more;’ and [Emma] walked on, amusing herself in the
consideration of the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances,
of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment are for ever falling into;
and not very well pleased with her brother for imagining her blind and ignorant, and in
want of counsel. He said no more.
At the heart of every novel Jane Austen ever wrote are three linked concepts relating
to the art of living: belief in the need to ‘make sense’ of the world into which
one is born; belief in accommodating oneself to that world’s requirements without
sacrificing intelligence, sensibility or honour; and conviction that an ability to
accomplish the first two can (though often with difficulty) be learned.
The film-maker who translates an Austen novel to the cinema or TV screen cannot escape
the pressure of these ideas, which were so deeply held by the author that every turn of
plot and every scrap of dialogue in her novels are saturated with them. The temptation to
escape ideas altogether must be strong in film-makers of our times – how else can we
explain the huge quantities of films made and successfully distributed worldwide every
year, whose directors cheerfully admit to abandoning the main themes of a difficult novel
in favour of ‘developing’ (they do not say ‘exploiting’) one aspect of
it, that aspect usually being an emphasis on sex or violence? Since Jane Austen’s
novels famously refuse to dwell on ‘guilt or misery,’ the recent craze for
making cinematic versions of her books is a phenomenon that must interest not only the
heterogeneous audiences such versions are designed to attract, but that long established
international community of single-minded literates, Jane Austen’s readers.
In this essay, which focuses on an unusual screen version of Emma titled Clueless,
made in 1995, we might begin with some observations about that novel and its suitability
to cinematic adaptation, particularly in comparison with Pride and Prejudice,
Austen’s best-known and most popular book (now more popular than ever before,
probably, following the BBC TV adaptation starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth).
... and to read more, join JASA and receive your
twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Jane and Isabelle: The First French Translation of Sense and
Sensibility
~ Angus Martin
Anglomania – an admiration for all things English – began in France in the
early 18th century and lasted well into 19th (in spite of the Napoleonic wars): there was
great enthusiasm for Byron from 1812 (with the publication of Childe Harolde) and
particularly for Scott from 1816 or so. Jane Austen did not make the same impression (in
spite of the early translation of her novels) and indeed has still today not the
reputation in France that she should have. Madame de Staèl, probably the most important
and influential French female author of the Austen’s day, considered Pride and
Prejudice, for instance, a ‘vulgar’ work – a remark that probably
denotes a lack of appreciation of the ordinariness of the setting and the events in the
novel1.
Curiously enough it was in French speaking Switzerland that the first translations of
the Austen corpus were made. In 1813, a periodical, published in Geneva, called the Bibliothèque
britannique offered its readers translated extracts from Orgueil et préjugé (Pride
and Prejudice) over four separate issues. In 1815, in the same periodical, the same
technique was used with Mansfield Park – a series of translated extracts with
linking summaries.
... and to read more, join JASA and receive your
twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Tests of Character: Austen, Dickens and my father's shoes
~ Peter Fitzpatrick
An odd conjunction, you’ll rightly think – even without the shoes. Certainly
the most immediately striking things in a comparison between these two novelists are their
profound, even polar, differences.
Austen and Dickens were, respectively, male and female for a start, and their gender
has in each case decisively shaped not only the attitudes and experiences that are
reflected in their work, but their critical reception; few writers have been discussed
more completely within stereotypical preconceptions of the gendered imagination. They
‘belong’ historically in adjacent but radically contrasting cultures, too.
Austen lived from 1775 till 1817, but is generally regarded as a temperamental Augustan
who happened to be a contemporary of the Romantic poets. Dickens (1812-70) was five years
old when Jane Austen died, and is characterised as quintessentially Victorian.
Austen’s career was marked by an anonymity which was partly sought by her and partly
a consequence of critical neglect. All her novels were published anonymously; the first
bore on its title page the modestly mysterious ‘By a Lady’, while subsequent
novels were inscribed ‘By the Author of [etc]’. Her novels were given scant
attention after her death, and the first study of her life and work, Edward
Austen-Leigh’s memoir, did not appear until 1870, the year of Dickens’ death.
Dickens, on the other hand, was a very prominent public figure over more than three
decades, much discussed, much loved and finally much lamented; his name, to borrow the
title of one of his editorial endeavours, was a household word.
... and to read more, join JASA and receive your
twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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Pus, Pestilence and Parturition: Health and Illness in Georgian England
~ Mary Webber
Jane Austen lived in what the Chinese might have regarded as ‘interesting
times’. Times that, medically speaking, border on the incomprehensible to us two
centuries later. Her lifetime overlaps the shift in the medical paradigm from the ancient
to what we would regard as a modern medicine, and her letters and novels represent almost
a work of medical archaeology, able to be interpreted by those appropriately endowed with
the necessary curiosity.
In these opening days of the third millennium we are bathed on a daily basis in the
waves of new or newly interpreted medical information. Information reaches the public at a
positively dizzying rate. A new breast cancer therapy is identified, published in the
Journal Cancer on Wednesday, on the Science Show on Sunday night and Monday morning
you can expect to be asked about it. And along the way the research project design will
have passed ethical review boards, have been adequately informed and consented by its
subjects, and the results will have met rigorous standards of accuracy and statistical
relevance, been double-blinded, placebo controlled and crossed over, before publication
can proceed.
We have the strongest expectations that medical science will proceed in a certain way;
that the results of research will be reproducible and that therapies will both be
available and more importantly, will work, and work safely. We conceptualise illness as a
temporary inconvenience, something that can and should be identified and dealt with
accurately. And our expectations are so strong that we will likely be not only cross, but
also litigious should they not be met. We expect doctors to be polite, egalitarian,
ethical, caring, and expert.
None of these expectations reliably applied in Jane Austen’s lifetime.
... and to read more, join JASA and receive your
twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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The Sickroom as Theatre
~ Christopher Cooper
Mary Webber’s lecture at the April meeting was thought-provoking. In Jane
Austen’s lifetime, the doctor wasn’t able to do much. Mostly he kept the patient
occupied while nature did the healing. But then, around that time, things began to change.
The medical profession started to question the assumptions about the human body that had
gone largely unchallenged since Aristotle. Of course it would take close on another
hundred years for this medical curiosity to result in treatments that actually worked. But
in those times medical theories abounded and many of them became part of the culture of
educated people – and not just those in the medical profession.
One of these was the theory that illness is greatly influenced by the mental and
emotional state of the patient – an idea that in recent times we’ve begun to
take seriously again. The problem was that in Jane Austen’s day such a notion had
come before its time – more basic things had to be discovered first, like
antiseptics, anaesthetics and antibiotics.
... and to read more, join JASA and receive your
twice-yearly copy of Sensibilities free.
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29 January 2004
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