The Jane Austen Society of Australia

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Extracts from Sensibilities
June 2004 - Volume 28

Contents

• New Light on Mansfield Park - John Wiltshire 
• Jane Austen and Lady Anne Barnard: the Writer’s Life - Tony Voss 
• Elevating the fraternal into the conjugal: an alternative to the ‘incest’ readings of Mansfield Park and Emma - Katrina Bell 
• Jane Austen at the Seaside - Hester Davenport

Book reviews

• The Complete Poems of James Austen, Jane Austen’s eldest brother, Edited by David Selwyn, JAS (UK), 2003 - Reviewed by Tony Voss 
• Jane Austen on Screen, Edited Gina Macdonald and Andrew F Macdonald, Cambridge University Press, 2003 - Reviewed by Harriet Jordan

New Light on Mansfield Park

John Wiltshire is a Reader in the School of English at Latrobe University, currently working on Mansfield Park for the upcoming Cambridge Companion edition of Jane Austen. He is the author of Jane Austen and the Body and Recreating Jane Austen.

Talk presented to the June 2003 JASA meeting 

When I spoke to the Jane Austen Society of Melbourne about two years ago, I had been busy doing what scholars call establishing the text, and I talked about the two editions of Mansfield Park – one in 1814 and one in 1816, and why we are going to base our edition on the second. 

Today I will talk mainly about some of my notes. I was trained as a literary critic, and have never really thought of myself as a scholar, so I’ve had to go through a sort of metamorphosis: not so much a caterpillar becoming a butterfly as a butterfly becoming a caterpillar, as you’ll see. A critic is very much a free agent. You say what you think. But an editor is a servant, even – it seems – something of a slave. An editor has to answer to a general Editor, who rejects or approves his work, and to the [publishers, Cambridge University] Press which makes decisions you have to abide by even if you don’t agree with them. So sometimes I’ve felt a bit like Fanny Price herself, forced to cross the park with the blooming roses and then go all the way back again because she’d forgotten to lock the door...

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Jane Austen and Lady Anne Barnard: the Writer’s Life 

Tony Voss was professor of English at the University of Natal, Durban, and has taught at universities in Israel, Zimbabwe and the US. His literary interests are in the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and South African literature. A member of JASA, he lectured to our Conference in 1996 on the economy of Mansfield Park. 

Lady Anne Lindsay, remembered in dictionaries of women writers and other reference works as ‘balladist, letter and travel writer’ or ‘poet, memoirist’ or ‘writer and hostess’ was a writer all her adult life. In 1771 she turned to writing verse when her beloved sister Margaret left the family in Scotland to marry (reluctantly) Alexander Fordyce of Roehampton and move to London. (‘I was melancholy, and endeavoured to amuse myself by attempting a few poetical trifles.’ qu. Lonsdale, 276) Like Jane Austen, Lady Anne wrote within her family, but unlike the novelist, ultimately only for her family. And Lady Anne gained her reputation only after she had turned 70, for ‘Auld Robin Gray’, the most popular Scottish ballad of the 19th century, written when she was 21. Jeanie, a village girl, loves Jamie, who is believed lost at sea. Under parental persuasion, Jeanie marries Auld Robin Gray (a name taken from ‘the old herd at Balcarres’). When Jamie returns, Jeanie sends him away:

I gang like a ghaist, and I carena much to spin;
I darena think o’ Jamie, for that wad be a sin.
But I will do my best a gude wife to be,
For auld Robin Gray, oh! He is sae kind to me. (Lonsdale, 277)

Lady Anne’s lyric replaced ‘the improper words’ of an old Scottish air ‘The Bridegroom greets when the Sun gangs down’. Sir Walter Scott named her as the author in his novel The Pirate and ended 50 years of speculation. Scott had originally intended to publish ‘Auld Robin Gray’ in Lays of the Lindsays but Lady Anne’s shyness and modesty led Scott to withdraw: perhaps to offset Scott’s losses, Lady Anne left him £50 in her will...

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Elevating the fraternal into the conjugal: an alternative to the ‘incest’ readings of Mansfield Park and Emma 

Katrina Bell is completing a post graduate degree in English at Sydney University. 

Jane Austen was an author pointedly concerned with the familial. Perhaps this is because she wrote of what was ‘familiar’, known to her. Yet in light of recent scholarship, it seems much more likely that her focus on the family was more a deliberate choice than a stylistic limitation. Consequently, a study of familial relationships within her novels is a key to an understanding of her broader agenda. This is not a new idea. Much has been written regarding her portrayal of the marital relationship, the parent-child bond and the relationship between sisters.1 But almost nothing has been written regarding the fraternal relationship, between brothers and sisters. When it has been mentioned it has mostly related to the issue of incest and the connection between the fraternal and the conjugal. In this paper I hope to show that Austen’s portrayal of the brother-sister relationship is a key technique in her work, and to replace the common incestuous interpretation of Mansfield Park and Emma with a different construction – that Austen so idolises the brother-sister relationship that in several of her novels she uses it as a foundation for marriage, and thereby elevates the fraternal into the conjugal.

Before I begin, however, it will be helpful to examine the brother-sister relationship among the landed classes, those about whom Austen wrote, of the late 18th and early 19th centuries...

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Jane Austen at the Seaside

Hester Davenport is the author of Faithful Handmaid: Fanny Burney at the Court of King George III (2000), and The Prince’s Mistress: A Life of Mary Robinson (2004). The current paper is derived from her talk to the 2003 JAS UK conference in Lyme Regis.

When, in the face of her husband’s refusal to send the family after the regiment to Brighton, Mrs Bennet wistfully declares that ‘A little sea-bathing would set me up for ever’, we know that it is the loss of opportunities with the red-coats that she is really lamenting. Nevertheless, she voices a commonplace desire of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, for most women of her class thought that sea-bathing would set them up, if not for ever, at least for a while. This is not the only reference to the culture of the seaside in Jane Austen’s novels of course. Emma and Persuasion, and the unfinished Sanditon which joyously satirises its practices, show her awareness of and amusement at its fads and follies.

Belief in the benefits of sea-bathing, sea-water drinking and even sea-air breathing, developed during the early 18th century. Medical men had noticed that fishermen and their wives had excellent health, put down to dosing themselves with salt water. Doctors started prescribing glasses of sea-water for a variety of ills, taken early in the morning and perhaps with a little milk or port, to make it more agreeable (theoretically). What was good for the inside must be good for the outside too, so immersion in sea-water followed...

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25 August 2006

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