As announced at Publishers Weekly and on Austenprose last week, a new Jane Austen short story anthology will be published by Random House in 2011. The anthology will include twenty stories inspired by Jane Austen, by many of your favorite authors of Jane Austen paraliterature – and also a contribution by the humble authors of Lady Vernon and Her Daughter.
There is an exchange in the Sherlock Holmes tale The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton that is particularly illustrative of Holmes’s character. Having exhausted all options for recovering his client’s letters from a ruthless blackmailer, Milverton, Holmes announces to Watson: “I mean to burgle Milverton’s house tonight.” Watson protests, but finally concedes that the act, while technically criminal is morally justifiable, and Holmes reasons, “Since it is morally justifiable, I have only to consider the question of personal risk. Surely a gentleman should not lay much stress upon this when a lady is in most desperate need of his help.”
Holmes, in Watson’s words, “disliked and distrusted the [female] sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent.” In reading Austen, Holmes would have discovered a chivalry worth emulating in the conduct of Darcy, who endures the mortification and expense of salvaging Lydia’s reputation, or Brandon’s calling-out of Willoughby to punish the seduction of Eliza. While Holmes declares that the work is his reward and it is art for art’s sake, there is a defining knight errantry associated with cases that involve vulnerable women – Holmes rescues Violet Smith from a forced marriage, Helen Stoner from a murderous stepfather and Grace Dunbar from a wrongful charge of murder. His most dramatic rescue, however, is the from-the-brink-of-death rescue of Lady Frances Carfax.
The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax begins with Holmes concluding, from Watson’s bootlaces, that he has been to the Turkish baths. “It is what we call an alterative in medicine,” replies Watson, admitting that he has been feeling “rheumatic.”
Holmes’s discourse takes another direction. “One of the most dangerous classes in the world,” he muses, “is the drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless, and often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter or crime in others. She is helpless. She is migratory…She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes. When she is gobbled up she is hardly missed.”
Holmes concludes by saying that he is afraid Lady Frances Carfax has met with foul play, but it may be that the inference of Watson’s therapeutic bath and the thoughtful meditation upon “drifting and friendless” women was influenced by a recent perusal of Jane Austen’s Persuasion; curative baths and the plight of vulnerable women is suggestive of Persuasion’s Mrs. Smith.
The most unfortunate character in all of Austen is Mrs. Smith, formerly Miss Hamilton, the invalid acquaintance of Anne Elliot. Unlike Mrs. and Miss Bates, who have likewise sunk from comfort to poverty, Mrs. Smith has no charitable neighbors to offer relief and stability. Like Lady Frances, she is migratory, relegated to – “obscure pensions and boarding-houses”, though Lady Frances’s spa in Baden is considerably finer than Mrs. Smith’s “noisy parlor and a dark bedroom behind” in Bath.
We meet Mrs. Smith about two-thirds of the way into Persuasion, when the Elliots settle in Bath. Anne Elliot is made aware of Mrs. Smith’s situation by a former governess, as Holmes is alerted to Lady Frances’s disappearance by her old governess when their regular correspondence has abruptly ceased.
Mrs. Smith, like Lady Frances, has been left “with limited means”. She is widowed, rheumatic and poor, her one object of value being some heavily encumbered property in the West Indies. Lady Frances has assets that are more accessible and portable – “some very remarkable old Spanish jewelry” that is always in her possession and that could easily make her “an inciter of crime in others.”
In Lady Frances Carfax, Holmes observes that “When you follow two separate chains of thought, Watson, you will find some point of intersection.” Mrs. Smith and Lady Frances have been accustomed to society and affluence, and both are inclined toward charity, but they have separate responses toward their plights and their piety: while Mrs. Smith has become cautious about her associations, having “seen too much of the world to expect sudden or disinterested attachment anywhere”, Lady Frances rebuffs a persistent lover and a faithful servant and allows herself to be taken in by a pair of seductive charlatans.
Lady Frances is described as “spiritual”, “religious” and “pious”, but it is a craving for piety, rather than piety itself, which has her fleeing from a coarse but sincere lover, and into the company of a couple who call themselves the Reverend and Mrs. Schlessinger, and whose, “…particular speciality is the beguiling of lonely ladies by playing upon their religious feelings”. Lady Frances whiles away her days fawning over the convalescent “missionary”; Mrs. Smith, on the other hand, takes up knitting needles in her rheumatic fingers and sells her handmade items to help support “one or two very poor families in this neighborhood.”
There is another common thread – a point of intersection – in their immobility. Mrs. Smith is confined, by her poverty and infirmity, to a pair of rooms, unable to move from one to the other, or to be carried to the baths, without assistance. Lady Frances suffers a somewhat darker fate; the Schlessingers first manipulate her into emotional dependence, and then into physical imprisonment, and finally, drugged and unconscious, into a coffin.
Both women come perilously close to being buried alive – Lady Frances literally and Mrs. Smith, figuratively – or “gobbled up”, as Holmes expressed it, and are rescued by gentlemen who are not put off by difficulty or personal risk when a lady is in need of his help. Holmes will not wait for a warrant before tearing into the Schlessingers’ custom-ordered coffin to free Lady Frances. Captain Wentworth, “by putting [Mrs. Smith] in the way of recovering her husband’s property in the West Indies, by writing for her, acting for her, and seeing her through all the petty difficulties of the case with the activity and exertion of a fearless man,” restores Mrs. Smith to all that she had been deprived of by Walter Elliot.
(You may read an account of the romance and marriage of Miss Hamilton and Charles Smith in Lady Vernon and Her Daughter).
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In reflecting upon the parallels between his professional life and episodes from the novels of Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes would likely have seen a good deal of Mansfield Park’s Mary Crawford in Irene Adler, his adversary in A Scandal in Bohemia. Both Sherlock Holmes and Mansfield’s Edmund Bertram are second sons who find themselves captivated by brilliant, but morally compromised women. For Holmes, the “adventuress” Irene Adler is The Woman, who “eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex”; Edmund Bertram believes it “impossible…that he should ever meet with such another woman [as Mary Crawford].” Mary is “the only woman in the world whom [Edmund] could ever think of as a wife”; and while Holmes is not a marrying man, “there was but one woman to him, and that woman was…Irene Adler.”
There are the obvious similarities – Mary and Irene are brunette, charming, accomplished, musical – and the similarities of character: Mary is “active and fearless”; Irene is “quick and resolute”. Holmes’s client describes Adler: “She has the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men” with “a soul of steel”; Mary Crawford describes herself: “I will stake my last like a woman of spirit…I am not born to sit still and do nothing.”
Even before Holmes sees Irene Adler, the case would suggest Mansfield Park. When his gauche client, under the alias of “Count Von Kramm”, parades into Holmes’s sitting room in his “deep blue cloak lined with flame-colored silk”, would he not immediately call up an image of the obtuse Rushworth/Count Cassel and his “blue dress and a pink satin cloak”?
Count Cassel is a character in the play “Lovers’ Vows”, which the young people of Mansfield Park attempt to stage, with Mary Crawford taking the part of Amelia. Amelia is caught between an arranged marriage to the immoral Count and the possibility of a love match with the poor clergyman, Anhalt. Irene Adler, likewise, is between lovers – the hereditary King of Bohemia who has jilted her and the young lawyer who wants to marry her. It is interesting that Mary urges Edmund Bertram to at least “go into the law” rather than the church, implying that she could condescend to marry a lawyer (as Irene Adler does) but not a country clergyman.
Sherlock Holmes, always conscious of irony, would have recognized the ironic contrast between Irene’s real marriage, and the play upon marriage during the Bertrams’ visit to Sotherton, Maria Bertram’s future home. When Maria and her fiancé stand at the altar of the family chapel, their friends/witnesses remark that it is a pity Edmund is not yet ordained; only a clergyman is wanted for Maria and Rushworth to be married immediately. Irene Adler and her husband-to-be have secured a clergyman, but their vows are stalled for the lack of a witness – until Holmes is drafted into the role. It is an ironic touch – “a distinct touch”, as Holmes would have called it – that he infiltrates Adler’s household disguised as “a dear, kind old clergyman”.
Each story ends with the lady’s departure; Mary Crawford leaves Mansfield Park and settles in London. Irene Adler leaves England for the Continent “never to return”. But what of their futures?
Austen leaves Mary Crawford “long in finding among the dashing representatives or idle heir apparents…anyone who could satisfy the tastes she had acquired at Mansfield.” But it is unlikely that a woman who relishes the sort of “pure, genuine pleasure” she experiences in horseback riding, or the attractions of the Mansfield theatricals sat still and did nothing. Irene Adler, while married at the end of A Scandal in Bohemia, seems no closer to domestic tranquility than Mary. She has married a London lawyer and they have left England – but what are they to live on? Unless her husband is independently wealthy, they will have had to rely upon Irene’s talent to support them.
I wonder whether Mary Crawford, like Irene Adler, was formed for a life on the stage. “I have been trained as an actress myself,” Adler writes to Holmes and Edmund Bertram, thinking of Mary’s eagerness to take a part in “Lovers’ Vows” concludes, “…the charm of acting might well carry fascination to the mind of genius.”
Perhaps it was Mary Crawford, under the stage name of “Miss Rock” who portrayed Amelia when Lovers’ Vows was performed on January 6, 1820 at the Theatre-Royal in Edinburgh.
Another distinct touch, as January 6 was Sherlock Holmes’s birthday.
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It piques the imagination to think that Sherlock Holmes, literature’s foremost protagonist was an admirer of Jane Austen. Certainly, we cannot agree with Watson when, in an early assessment of Holmes’s abilities, ranked his friend’s knowledge of literature as “nil”; after all, in The Boscombe Valley Mystery, it is Watson who, in want of reading material, settles for the hotel’s yellow-backed novel while Holmes travels with his “pocket Petrarch”.
Jane Austen’s romances would have little charm for Sherlock Holmes, who declared that “…love is an emotional thing and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true, cold reason which I place above all things.” The themes of charity, chivalry, prudence, as well as the pithy insights and the “pawky humor”, however, would have had considerable appeal, as would the tart exchanges – how could Holmes, who looked upon an invitation as “one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie” feel anything but affinity for a Darcy who disparages the entertainment of the evening with his, “Every savage can dance.”
Although Holmes remarks that “…life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent”, as a reader of Austen, he would have occasion to ponder the strange similarity between his professional life and Austen’s invented ones.
There is, for example, an interesting parallel between Lady Susan Vernon, of Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan, and Mrs. Isadora Klein, the antagonist in The Adventure of the Three Gables.
Lady Susan was written by Jane Austen more than a century before Sherlock Holmes would encounter Isadora Klein (William Baring-Gould’s ambitious chronology places The Three Gables in the spring of 1903 – the story was first published in 1920). Holmes pronounces Klein “the most lovely widow upon Earth”, though Watson observes that she has “reached the time of life when even the proudest beauty finds the half-light more welcome”. Lady Susan Vernon, likewise, is “the most accomplished coquette in England” is “excessively pretty”, although “a lady no longer young.”
Neither widow appears to be overcome with grief – Lady Susan Vernon, a month after her husband’s death, descends upon the household of the Manwarings, where she shamelessly flirts with her married host; in a letter to a friend, she writes that “the whole family are at war” and “the females of the family are united against me”; yet adds that she has “seldom spent three months more agreeably”.
When she is no longer welcome at the Manwarings’, she invites herself to the home of her in-laws, the Vernons, and is placed in the delicate position of keeping the persistent Manwaring at bay in order to work on the affections of Mrs. Vernon’s wealthy younger brother, Reginald deCourcy.
Similarly, Mrs. Klein mourns her husband’s passing with “an interval of adventure when she pleased her own tastes”, and one indulgence is her short-lived appetite for the passionate, but penniless Douglas Maberley. Maberley is as persistent as Manwaring, but Mrs. Klein does not have Lady Susan’s patience, nor her confidence that she can juggle the current lover with the former one – when Maberley will not give her up, Mrs. Klein has him brutally beaten and driven away, clearing the way for her to latch onto the wealthy Duke of Lomond, “who might almost be her son”, and leading to Maberley’s posthumous retaliation, which draws Holmes into the matter. Not that Lady Susan is any less vicious; when the irrepressible Sir James Martin annoys her, she writes, “I could have poisoned him.”
Both pairings – Mrs. Klein and the Duke, and Lady Susan and Reginald – face parental opposition. The Duke’s mother might overlook Mrs. Klein’s age, but would not tolerate the scandal that would certainly result from the publication of Maberley’s roman a clef; Reginald’s father cautions his son that Lady Susan’s “want of character” is a more serious concern than the difference in their ages.
Mrs. Klein is the more cautious of the two – perhaps she has learned something from reading Lady Susan as well! – she has tested her minions and pronounces them “…good hounds who run silent…They will take what comes to them. That is what they are paid for.” For Lady Susan, however, “…it is impossible to be sure of servants.” Both, however, are linked to a London gossip –Langdale Pike of The Three Gables is the “human book of reference upon all matters of social scandal”, a description that might as easily describe Lady Susan’s Alicia Johnson.
Was Holmes thinking of Jane Austen’s droll conclusion to Lady Susan when he resolved the Maberley/Klein affair? Lady Susan Vernon does not marry Reginald; ironically, she marries Sir James, the heir she had picked out for her daughter. And while the Granada adaptation of The Three Gables has Holmes extract a promise from Mrs. Klein that she will break her engagement with the young Duke, the tale contains no such promise; Mrs. Klein suffers no significant consequence for her violent and criminal conduct other than the five thousand pounds she is compelled to pay to Maberley’s mother, a small price to attain the title of Duchess.
The next installment will discuss another pair of Austen and Sherlockian ladies.
Janetility welcomes discussion and comments, provided they are carried out with good-humor and good-breeding.
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