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Extracts from Sensibilities
June 2005

Volume 30: June 2005

• The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen - Janet Todd 
• Character in Jane Austen – an actor’s view - Angela Barlow 
• The Woman Jane Austen Avoided: Germaine de Staël - Lucinda Holdforth 
• The Business of Feet - Susannah Fullerton 

Book reviews

• Jane Austen’s Brother Abroad: The Grand Tour Journals of Edward Austen, Edited by Jon Spence - reviewed by John Wiltshire 
• A Fine Brush on Ivory: an Appreciation of Jane Austen by Richard Jenkyns - reviewed by Penny Gay 
• Jane Austen and the Enlightenment by Peter Knox-Shaw - reviewed by Michael Giffin 
• Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and the Mentor-Lover by Patricia Menon - reviewed by Christine Alexander 
• Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman by Pamela Aidan - reviewed by Joanna Penglase 
• Searching for Jane Austen by Emily Auerbach - reviewed by Amanda Jones 

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen

Janet Todd has been a pioneer in excavating early women writers. She has published complete editions of Aphra Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft (with Marilyn Butler). Her latest books are Mary Wollstonecraft: a revolutionary life (2000) and Daughters of Ireland (2004). She is now completing an introduction to Jane Austen for another publication, and working on a study of Wollstonecraft’s children. She is a professor at the University of Aberdeen and an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge.

I am writing to acquaint members of the Jane Austen Society with an exciting project, the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen, of which I am the general editor. This consists of eight volumes of the novels – Juvenilia edited by Peter Sabor, Northanger Abbey edited by Barbara Benedict with Deirdre Le Faye, Sense and Sensibility edited by Edward Copeland, Pride and Prejudice edited by Pat Rogers, Mansfield Park edited by John Wiltshire, Emma edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan, Persuasion edited by Janet Todd and Antje Blank, and Later Manuscripts edited by Brian Southam. There will also be a ninth volume entitled Jane Austen in Context with 40 entries on Jane Austen’s life, times and criticism. Several of these entries have been contributed by members of the Jane Austen Society (UK) Committee: ‘Poetry’ and ‘Consumer goods’ by David Selwyn, ‘Food’ by Maggie Lane, ‘Professions’ by Brian Southam and ‘Composition and publication’ by Kathryn Sutherland. 

As all members are well aware, Jane Austen has a unique status in English literature. What Henry Crawford remarks about Shakespeare in Mansfield Park has become equally true of its author: she 

is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. [Her] thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with [her] by instinct.

Jane Austen wrote to be read and re-read. Her subtle, crafted novels repay close and repeated attention to vocabulary, syntax and punctuation as much as to irony and allusion. This new edition of the complete oeuvre of the published novels and manuscript works is testament to her exceptional cultural and literary position, and its aim is to aid and contribute to ongoing scholarship...

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

Character in Jane Austen – an actor’s view

Angela Barlow, English actor, has been working in theatre and television for 30 years, and brings grace and control to an actor’s insights into Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë in one-woman performances in England and Australia. 

Character is, of course, a natural subject for an actor to examine, but in Jane Austen it is an infinite subject. Rather as an actor finds in a well-written play that his or her interpretation can grow all through a long run, so the persistent reader of Jane Austen can find that her characters contain infinite subtlety. Here then, we can only touch on some aspects of this huge subject. Perhaps we can share the enjoyment of a few of Austen’s great creations and apply an actor’s view as to how she might have put them together. 

Inevitably, some of the screen versions of the books will receive a mention, but I will try not to dwell on Mr Darcy’s wet shirt unless absolutely intrinsic to the point!...

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

The Woman Jane Austen Avoided: Germaine de Staël

Lucinda Holdforth is a Sydney speechwriter. She has previously worked as a researcher at ABC Television; career diplomat with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, speechwriter to former Australian Minister for Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Kim Beazley; and communications specialist for a management consulting firm. She has had articles and columns published in Australian newspapers and magazines. True Pleasures: A Memoir of Women in Paris is her first book.

Jane Austen wasn’t the only person to avoid Madame de Staël. There were plenty of others like her. The great German writer Goethe, warned by the philosopher Schiller that ‘to stand up to her volubility will be a hard task’ promptly left Weimar and retired to bed in Jena when he heard that Germaine de Staël was coming to town. And when Goethe finally and reluctantly returned, he and Madame de Staël had a series of disastrous meetings. She thought he was 

a stocky man, with an undistinguished physiognomy, who likes to act like a man of the world but only half succeeds.

He thought she was outrageous, discussing the deepest political and philosophical ideas with the frivolous ease of a French dinner party. Schiller, a fan, said of Germaine de Staël with some exasperation, 

she insists on explaining everything, understanding everything, measuring everything. She admits of no Darkness, nothing Incommensurable; and where her torch throws no light, there nothing can exist. 

The English writer Fanny Burney first met Madame de Staël in 1793 when the Frenchwoman was in exile due to the French Revolution. With a group of dazzlingly sophisticated émigrés like her former lover Talleyrand, who would one day be French Foreign Minister, and her current lover Narbonne, who had been French Defence Minister, Germaine de Staël was living at Juniper Hall in Surrey... 

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

The Business of Feet 

Susannah Fullerton is president of the Jane Austen Society of Australia. She lectures widely on literature throughout Australia and is a well known presenter on the Speakers’ Circuit. Her first book, edited with A Harbers, was Jane Austen – Antipodean Views. Her latest work Jane Austen and Crime was published by JASA in 2004..

In 1850 William Smith Williams of the London publishing firm Smith Elder & Co. sent his new author, Charlotte Brontë, a parcel of books. Amongst these books was Jane Austen’s Emma. Charlotte wrote to thank Mr Williams and commented on Miss Austen’s style and how very different it was from her own:

She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; there is a chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting: she ruffles her reader by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her … Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet.

Her business is with the eyes, mouth, hands and feet? Soon after I joined JASA, President Nora Walker set Charlotte’s comment as the basis for a writing competition. I created an imaginary letter from Jane Austen, giving her reaction to Charlotte’s quote, and won the competition, so I have had a soft spot for it ever since...

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

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13 January 2007

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