J A N E T I L I T Y

     I have always thought that the original manuscript of Sense and Sensibility – an epistolary novel called Elinor and Marianne – would be a significant literary “get”. It would have been of particular interest to us in converting the epistolary novella Lady Susan to a narrative novel, Lady Vernon and Her Daughter but beyond that, it would have given readers another view of a transitional work, one that bridged Austen’s juvenilia and her mature work. Did Elinor and Marianne have the same raciness as Lady Susan? Was it as 18th century in its execution? How radically different was it in style, as well as form, from Sense and Sensibility?

     In a letter dated January, 1801, many years after Austen wrote Lady Susan, she wrote to her sister, “I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.” Letters, in Austen’s opinion, were conversation; like conversation, these letters deliver information, explanations, news. Moreover, the letters in Austen’s novels always bear the distinct conversational style of the writer. Lydia Bennet’s “Let us talk and laugh all the way home…Have you seen any pleasant men? Have you had any flirting?” conveys the same high spirited tone as her written, “You will laugh when you know where I am gone and I cannot help laughing myself.” Lucy Steele’s parting shot in her farewell letter to Edward, “Please to destroy my scrawls, but the ring with my hair you are very welcome to keep”, delivers the same sort of saccharine jab as her remark to Elinor: “Your regard for me, next to Edward’s love, is the greatest comfort I have.” Mary Musgrove whines in her letters – “I am always out of the way when anything desirable is going on” –  and she whines in her conversation: “So you and I are to be left to shift by ourselves with this poor sick child – this is always my luck.” And when Mrs. Bennet anxiously anticipates being left a widow, Mr. Bennet’s dry, “Let us flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor”, is not unlike his pithy written advice to Mr. Collins, to “…stand by the nephew [Mr. Darcy]; he has more to give.”

    Another conversational quality of the letters in Austen’s novels is that, while personal, they are seldom secretive. Letters are routinely shared: Elizabeth reveals much of Darcy’s letter to Jane; the Westons disclose the contents of Frank Churchill’s letter to Emma; Catherine Morland allows Tilney to read her unhappy letter from James. What is disclosed in the letters inevitably becomes more widely known. There is, in fact, only one letter in Austen’s major novels that conveys secret feelings which the writer would not want shared with the world at large. In Persuasion, Mr. Elliot’s letter to Mr. Smith has been preserved by Smith’s widow. “Give me joy,” writes Elliot, “I have got rid of Sir Walter and Miss [Elizabeth Elliot]…he is worse than last year…I wish I had any name but Elliot, I am sick of it.” Still, it does not vary from his prior conversational style, as we know from Mrs. Smith that “I have often heard him declare that if baronetcies were saleable, anybody should have his for fifty pounds, arms and motto, name and livery included.” Even Mary Crawford, who brazenly imagines the upshot of Tom Bertram’s demise; i.e., that his wealth and consequence could fall into no better hands than that of his younger brother, writes that she would say the same to anyone “..with a fearless face and bold voice.”

      Austen’s gift for creating a distinct conversational style, and extending it to a character’s letters is all the more impressive when you view it in contrast to what passes for correspondence today. A typical “how r u 2day” text could come from any number of senders, without distinction, identity, style or, emoticon notwithstanding, personality.

The Avalon Free Public Library, Avalon (“Cooler By A Mile!”) NJ will be our host on June 28th, for a lecture and book signing. We will be giving a talk on converting Jane Austen’s Lady Susan to Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, and on writing for publication. There will be plenty of time for Q&A, and as an added benefit, Caitlen will be bringing a small stock of her newly-released middle grade fantasy Ordinary Magic to the signing.

The event is free and open to the public.

Where and When: Avalon Free Public Library, 235  32nd Street, Avalon, NJ  08202  -  Thursday June, 28 @ 7 PM

And check the library’s web site for their roster of summer events, workshops and classes http://www.avalonfreelibrary.org/

  We will be guests and featured speakers at a Jane Austen High Tea on Sunday, April 22 at 2 PM, given by Rosemont College, 1400 Montgomery Avenue, Rosemont, PA. The public is invited; however, you must submit the RSVP form that you will find by clicking on the link below, so that the organizers may have a head count.

  The event will be hosted by Professor Mary Ann Macartney, to whom Lady Vernon and Her Daughter was dedicated.

http://www.rosemont.edu/calendars/detail.aspx?pageaction=VSIPublicBlock2&LinkID=1192&ModuleID=22:27&StartDate=4/22/2012

“Tomorrow, I shall be just like Camilla in Mr. Dubster’s summer-house; for my Lionel will have taken away the ladder by which I came here, or at least by which I intended to get away and here I must stay till his return.”  So wrote Jane Austen to Cassandra in 1796, when her return to Steventon was delayed because none of her brothers were able to escort her. She describes her predicament by alluding to one of the most popular novels of the day, Fanny Burney’s Camilla. In one chapter, the title character and her sister climb a ladder to examine an elevated summer-house; the ladder is removed by their mischievous brother, Lionel, who rides off and leaves them stranded.

Frances "Fanny" Burney

Exclusive of Austen’s reference to Camilla, it may be inferred that Austen was a reader of Burney. Fanny Burney’s first three novels – Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796)– were  “coming of age” novels, which usually involved the heroine’s departure from home and her introduction to a to a society that requires her to make romantic and moral choices. You see this influence in Austen; in all of her novels, save for Emma, significant episodes occur when the heroine leaves the family home. (And, in the case of Emma, this is true of Jane Fairfax). The two authors’ works share a common element: that the vanity, ignorance, prejudices, but also the morality, which had incubated in the family circle are tested against the failings and merits of a broader environment and a new set of acquaintances.

When  Austen wrote her earliest complete works – the work later titled Lady Susan, and Elinor and Marianne, which became Sense and Sensibility - they were written in the epistolary fashion of Evelina . Moreover, when the Reverend Mr. Austen attempted to interest Burney’s publisher in his daughter’s early work (most reports state that the work was First Impressions; an auction notice offering the signed portion of Mr. Austen’s letter suggests that it was Sense and Sensibility), he makes a comparison, in length, to Evelina.

Austen followed up Elinor and Marianne with First Impressions; however, by the time of its publication, there was already a popular novel titled First Impressions, or The Portrait (by Mrs. Margaret Holford), so Austen drew upon the final chapter of Cecilia for her Plan B title, Pride and Prejudice. Cecilia’s plot revolves around a conditional bequest, wherein a young lady’s inheritance depends upon her suitor’s consent to assume her family surname. (Derived, perhaps, from the actual situation of real-life heiress Mary Eleanor Bowes). In bringing the complications to conclusion, the summation, given by the character Lyster, states: “The whole of this unfortunate business has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE…if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination.” (Yes, it is rendered in upper case in the printing).

However, one might wonder whether Austen drew upon the work of another Burney in crafting some of her characters. In 1807, she writes of re-reading the novel Clarentine (1796) by Sarah Burney (Fanny’s step-sister): “We are reading Clarentine and are surprised to find how foolish it is. I remember liking it much less on a second reading than the first, and it does not bear a third at all.” And yet, there is something very Marianne Dashwood about Clarentine’s assertion that, “It is equally impossible for me to forget, or not to feel”, and something quite Darcy-like in Sir Edgar’s “…reserve, which frequently cast a gloom over his features…appeared to denote an unsocial and contemptuous disposition in himself [which] had often displeased her extremely and led her, very naturally, to suspect him of a degree of arrogance and pride.”

If Austen’s assessment of Sarah Burney’s contrived plotting is that it is “full of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties, without striking merits of any kind”, she is good-natured enough to take such criticism to task as well in Northanger Abbey, by citing embarrassed novel-readers who confess that, “’It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’, or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed.”

“My father is now reading The Midnight Bell, which he has got from the library, and mother sitting by the fire.” So wrote Jane Austen, from the Bull and George coaching inn, in October, 1798. It is an interesting portrait, the practical Reverend George Austen reading (aloud, perhaps) from one of the most popular Gothic novels of the day, the library book that he enjoyed well enough to carry while traveling.

The Midnight Bell, was published in the first half of 1798, not very long before Jane Austen began writing Northanger Abbey (then called   Susan), and Austen references that novel in her work as one of the ten or twelve Udolpho-like books that Isabella Thorpe has compiled to read with Catherine.

The author of The Midnight Bell was Francis Lathom. Like Austen, he was a precocious writer who enjoyed an early period of productivity followed by a lapse, and then a renewal of creativity in the years preceding his death. While Austen and Lathom were roughly the same age, by the late 1790s, she had, to her credit, a batch of juvenile writing and two unpublished epistolary novels: an untitled one (Lady Susan) that she later recopied and abandoned, and Elinor and Marianne, the early version of Sense and Sensibility. Lathom, on the other hand, had already churned out a number of stage plays, many of which had been produced, and published his first novel, The Castle of Ollada. Reviews of his plays were often lukewarm. The Monthly Mirror, July 1801, wrote of one: “The author possesses some vivacity and a tolerable notion of what is agreeable to the taste of a modern audience; but the interest and humor of this piece are very slight” and A Companion to the Playhouse pronounced one of his early comedies “frivolous and uninteresting” and “deservedly condemned”. On the other hand, The Cabinet wrote that Lathom was “..one of the best novelists of the modern school.”

Lathom was among the earliest novelists to incorporate historical fact with sensational fiction. Reality did not displace the Gothic staples, however: there were an abundance of exotic locations, secret passages, abductions, wretched wanderers, long lost parents, noble villains and damsels in distress. It is unlikely that Lathom’s integration of history or extravagant melodrama had appeal for Jane Austen as something to be imitated; she avoided history and– other than lampooning them in Northanger Abbey – Gothic-style histrionics. Lathom’s knack for irony and satire would not have escaped her, however, and one can imagine Jane smiling as her father read, “He threw himself upon the ground in despair; in a few minutes, however, recollecting that inactivity could add little to forward his wishes, he rose”, or, “The gates of the castle being locked might be construed into an indication either of its being inhabited or not being inhabited.” It is possible as well that when Austen crafted heroines and heroes who learned to distinguish between social rank and genuine merit, she reflected upon Lathom’s observation in Men and Manners, that “Such is the frailty of human nature, that the sneer of a fool has more power to raise its feelings than the admonitions of a wise man has to restrain them.”

Rosemont College:  We will be attending a Jane Austen tea at Rosemont College, Rosemont, PA on Sunday, April 22. (Lady Vernon and Her Daughter was dedicated to Rosemont professor, Mary Ann Macartney).

Avalon Public Library: We will be speaking about Jane Austen and Lady Vernon and Her Daughter at the Avalon Public Library, Avalon, NJ on Thursday, June 28.

We will keep everyone updated!

Putting Sherlock Holmes on the track of Jack the Ripper is unquestionably tempting; the Ripper murders occurred at a time when Holmes would have been an ambitious thirtysomething detective and quite receptive to a complex and challenging case. There has never been a positive identification of the Ripper, nor any explanation (other than the obvious: he died, emigrated, was incapacitated or imprisoned) for the abrupt termination of the killings. Drawing Holmes into such an intriguing, open-ended puzzle has invited the talents of authors Ellery Queen, Michael Dibdin,  Edward Hanna, Carole Nelson Douglas and Lyndsay Faye.

 Holmes vs the Ripper has been the subject of a couple films as well, and one that is both the most and least satisfying is the 1979 film Murder By Decree. Here, the plot exploits one of the more colorful theories: that the murdered women had knowledge of an illegitimate child who was the result of an affair (or unofficial marriage) between the Duke of Clarence, second in line to the throne, and the lowborn Annie Crook. Defenders of the heir confine Crook to an asylum and pressure her to reveal the child’s whereabouts while they systematically kill off the prostitutes who were privy to the liaison.

The most laudable aspect of the film – in fact the only laudable one – is in the casting. Christopher Plummer (Holmes) and James Mason (Watson) are on the somewhat mature side, but there is a wonderful compatibility that is not often (read: “almost never”) depicted in translations of the Canon. Mason does make one appreciate that Watson may be the harder role to pull off; with fewer props on which to string a performance – no pipe, no violin, no disguise, no displays of agility or temperament – an accomplished actor has to flesh out the dimensions of character without sinking into caricature. The fact that Mason can express his indignation at Holmes’s “squashing a fellow’s pea” without lapsing into the blustering inanity that was the default mode of other actors (read: “Nigel Bruce”) is commendation enough. Plummer is equally engaging – without ever lapsing into uncharacteristic sentimentality, his performance hints at the “great heart as well as of a great brain”: commanding, compassionate, humorous and completely authentic, even when saddled with the deerstalker and Inverness.

Mason, Finlay (as Lestrade) and Plummer

There is an impressive supporting cast as well: Donald Sutherland, David Hemmings, John Gielgud, Anthony Quayle, Frank Finlay and particularly Susan Clark as Mary Kelly, and Genevieve Bujold as Annie Crook; their scenes with Plummer are the most poignant moments of the film. (As an interesting side note, Finlay, who portrays Lestrade here, also portrayed Lestrade in another Holmes vs the Ripper film, the 1965, A Study in Terror; Quayle, who here is Sir Charles Warren was Doctor Murray in the ’65 film).

Plummer with Clark (as Mary Kelly)

Plummer with Bujold (as Annie Crook)

As for the everything else: watching this again (I had seen it years ago), I realized what is unsatisfying about it. For a film that offers an intriguing theory about the Ripper that brings together a royal conspiracy and a vicious serial killer with literature’s most famous detective, the film is rather suspenseless. Perhaps it is the jarring score that forecasts every crime so relentlessly that the crime itself becomes almost anticlimactic. Perhaps it is the reticence with which the crimes are rendered – one can be shocking without being explicit. And, perhaps, it is the awkward angling of the exterior shots to camouflage the use of sound stages. At any rate, it remains just good enough to make a viewer wish it had been better.

Which Austen character would have enjoyed Murder By Decree? Colonel Brandon would certainly have admired Holmes for risking his life and reputation in a just cause; Frank Churchill would have understood keeping secrets out of self-preservation, and Mary Bennet may have drawn a useful lesson from the prostitutes’ conspiracy: that one false step can involve a woman in endless ruin.

And three degrees of Austen: Particularly easy here, since Donald Sutherland, who plays the psychic Robert Lees, was Mr. Bennet in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice.

Happy Cyber Monday, everyone!  Janetility is kicking off the buyingest time of the year by giving you the chance to get something for free.  Janetility is a offering a holiday givaway to book clubs!

Any US book club (sorry, US only), whether local, library-sponsored, after school, civic, special interest, may enter our drawing for six (6) free signed copies of Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, our adaptation of Jane Austen’s early novella, Lady Susan. To enter the giveaway, just send an e-mail to: ladyvernonbook@gmail.com.  Please put ‘Lady Vernon book club giveaway‘ in the subject line and your name and book club’s name in the body of the e-mail.

The drawing will be held on January 1, 2012 and the winner will be notified the following week. The winner will be asked to supply a street mailing address (not a PO Box).

Read me. For free!

On Saturday, April 16, we had a wonderful afternoon with the Central Jersey chapter of JASNA to talk about Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, its genesis and the transition of Lady Susan to a more sympathetic Lady Vernon. Geri Benedetto was a delightful hostess, and we genuinely appreciate their kind welcome.

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.