The Jane Austen Society of Australia

Extracts from Sensibilities
June 2002

• A Biographer Reflects - Claire Tomalin

• Poems of Anne Lefroy (1749-1804) - Jon Spence 

• Illustrating Jack & Alice for the Juvenilia Press - Juliet McMaster 

• Introducing Jack & Alice - Joseph Wiesenfarth 

• The Janeites - Rudyard Kipling 

• Jane Austen and the Cult of Horror - Raymond Southall 

• Heroes, Hornblower and Captain Wentworth - Dennis Nutt

Book reviews

• The Author's Inheritance: Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and the Establishment of the Novel, Jo Alyson Parker 
  Reviewed by Yvette Field 

• Jane Austen and Narrative Authority, Tara Ghosh Wallace 
  Reviewed by Pamela Nutt

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 lists of articles.

A Biographer Reflects
~ Claire Tomalin

Today I am going to talk mostly about Jane Austen’s friendships with other women. I came to consider a book about Austen after writing two earlier books about remarkable contemporaries of hers – Mary Wollstonecraft, who made the first effective written claim for the rights of her sex, and Dora Jordan, who lived the life of a professional woman – she was a comic actress – and established herself at the top of her profession, while living a recklessly unorthodox private life. All three of these women set their seal on the age in which they lived, albeit in very different fashions. Austen was the greatest, and she was also the quietest; but they seem to me to have something in common – an alertness to the condition of their sex. There may be a feminist slant to what I say today.

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Poems of Anne Lefroy (1749-1804)
~ Jon Spence

Anne Lefroy is best known to Jane Austen’s readers as the subject of
Austen’s poem ‘To the Memory of Mrs Lefroy,’ commemorating their friendship and the coincidence of Anne’s having died on Jane Austen’s own birthday. Mrs Lefroy and her husband, the Rev George Lefroy, rector of Ashe, had come to live in the Steventon neighbourhood in 1783 when Jane was seven. There was apparently an immediate affinity between the child Jane Austen and the 34-year-old Anne Lefroy. Not least among their common interests was a love of literature.

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Illustrating Jack & Alice for the Juvenilia Press
~ Juliet McMaster

‘I look upon you Sir to be a very good sort of Man in the main’, the stunningly beautiful Charles Adams tells his potential father-in-law; ‘a drunken old Dog to be sure [he adds], but that’s nothing to me’. That combination of the formal with the outrageous – the loftily condescending air, followed by the unabashed put-down – typifies Jane Austen’s style in her youthful jeu d’esprit, Jack & Alice. Such combinations occur all through this wonderfully funny tale. And in my illustrations to our new Juvenilia Press edition edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth I tried to carry on the mixture of the apparently elevated language with the down-to-earth – even slapstick – content.

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Introducing Jack & Alice
~ Joseph Wiesenfarth

... let me take you back to the evening of 16 November 2000 when I boarded a plane in Chicago and put down early on the morning of the 17th at Heathrow, immediately hastened to the bus terminal there and went straight away to Oxford to work at the Bodleian Library where the manuscript of Jane Austen’s Volume the First, containing Jack & Alice  is housed.

I went to the Bodleian’s admissions office with a form that I had downloaded from their website all filled out and signed by the head of my department. As I awaited my turn to be interviewed, I heard the various people who preceded me reciting an oath of allegiance to the queen or something of that sort. ‘Strange,’ I said to myself. ‘But then again the English are well known for their eccentricity. Let it go. If you have to pledge allegiance to read Jane Austen’s manuscript, it’s all in a day’s work!’

When I was summoned for an interview, the admissions officer told me that my adjectival application for admission was improperly filled out...

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The Janeites
~ Rudyard Kipling

Jane lies in Winchester – blessed be her shade!
    Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!
And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,
    Glory, love, and honour unto England’s Jane!

This classic soldier story from Kipling, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1907, coined the term Janeites, and deserves re-introduction to a new generation of Austen followers.

Reprinted in full.

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Jane Austen and the Cult of Horror
~ Raymond Southall

The most serious criticism of Jane Austen’s caricature of the Ann Radcliffe brand of fiction is that it fails to address the underlying reasons for its popularity, despite the hint contained in Eleanor Tilney’s confusion of talk of a forthcoming Gothic novel with the prospect of an uprising in London. To understand the appeal of such works as The Mysteries of Udolpho it is not sufficient to suppose that the thrills they provided were bound to capture the imaginations of those addicted to popular fiction. To begin with, the Gothic novel was of very recent origin and its terrors would have been as risible to an earlier generation as they are to Henry Tilney. The readership it catered for was one that found polite literature – the poets, philosophers and historians – too daunting and for whom a novel such as Tom Jones was already being considered too risqué. In short, it locked primarily on to Mr Woodhouse’s ‘ladies’, those whom Keats did not wish to read his poetry, respectable but relatively unsophisticated women, of whom Catherine Morland is a type.

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Heroes, Hornblower and Captain Wentworth
~ Dennis Nutt

This is not a paper about Jane Austen and the navy although, of necessity, it may seem like that at times. Rather, it is an exploration of how two fictional naval officers relate to the classical concept of the hero. I will begin by outlining the classical view of a hero and then relate that view to C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and Jane Austen’s Frederick Wentworth.

It is not fashionable to study ‘heroes’ today because we are sceptical that the decisions of individuals will suffice to explain why things happen. Superhuman powers will not do either. We keep Nemesis or Fortune, God or Fate, only for occasional flourishes. Instead, we seek to explain things in abstractions that we have constructed for ourselves.

Even those who still appear to study heroes as such prefer to do so, in fact, by sidestepping them. Biographers, for example, no longer write the parallel lives of the great men and women, the heroes, as Plutarch did. To do a biography now means discussing the person’s life and times. So even an unimportant person may have a good biography because that person is in fact portrayed as a mirror to others. Instead of attending to character and appearance and so on, as Suetonius did in his Lives of the Twelve Caesars, we appeal with all the authority of psychology to that false, tendentiously labelled and historically illusive thing called the formative years.

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29 January 2004

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