J A N E T I L I T Y

For more than a hundred fifty years after her death, the canon of Jane Austen inspired a memoir, a few works of literary criticism and a a quarter shelf-full of sequels and adaptations of her work, but in the past fifteen years or so, Jane Austen has become a literary star, generating everything from critiques and biographies to annotated editions, sequels, adaptations, character spinoffs, modern takes, graphic novels, and mashups.  Jane Austen has outlasted popular contemporaries like Mary Brunton, Sydney Owenson and Eaton Stannard Barrett, and touched off a market for derivative work comparable only to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and with a considerably smaller canon – talk about the six that keep on giving!

If you are thinking about writing a sequel, adaptation, or new novel featuring a minor Austen character as Austen might have done, it helps to decipher how Austen writes. It is more than a matter of knowing the period – in fact, knowing the period may be least important component. After all, Jane Austen did not write historical novels, she wrote contemporary novels, so it really is not important for an adaptive writer to explain how an entail works or the color of someone’s barouche. Writing like someone else can be tricky; if you have ever seen an impressionist, the good ones do more than getting the voice right – they get the inflection, the cadence, the body language. There is a book called What Jane Austen Ate, and What Charles Dickens Knew; to write like Austen, you have to grasp, not merely what Austen ate or knew, but what Austen did, not only regarding setting and  social order, but what techniques she employed as a narrator and wordsmith.

It helps (that is, it helped us in writing Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, and with our current project), to have a few key volumes on the Austen shelf (or shelves) in your home library. A few may be taken for granted – Deirdre LeFaye’s Jane Austen’s Letters, and perhaps something like LeFaye’s  Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels. You may pick up an annotated book, or James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen or something fun like So You Think You Know Jane Austen?, and of course you have all of Austen’s fiction. Here are a few more that I think would be excellent additions to the Austen writer’s library.

I would consider Mary Lascelles’ Jane Austen and Her Art (Clarendon Press, 1939) to be an essential. Lascelles begins with a brief bio of Austen and the evolution of her literary taste, and then goes into a very clear study of Austen’s narrative style, with wonderful kernels of observation, such as Austen’s suggesting of her characters’ social variants in syntax and phrasing rather than vocabulary when they speak, or the pithy observation that a literary strategy – “What a young woman needs if she is to become a heroine of fiction is a little neglect and ill usage” – may have been extracted from experience. Of course some rules are meant to be broken and in Lady Vernon we did depart from two of Lascelles’ observations: that the marriage proposal of a lover is never verbally expressed (Mr. Collins doesn’t count; he cannot be considered an authentic lover); and a conversation exclusively between gentlemen (with a lady participating or at least being in the room), does not occur.

I had once remarked to an editor that Austen’s novels come down to two interconnected issues: marriage and money.  Except for Emma Woodhouse, none of Austen’s heroines are so well off or well connected that they can anticipate “marrying up”; a number of siblings, a neglectful or imprudent father, a reversal of fortune threaten to keep many of Austen’s heroines from that “… pleasantest preservative from want” and “…the only honorable provision” for a gentlewoman of modest means, which marriage certainly was. How a marriage was contracted, how a wife, a widow and children were provided for was as inextricably linked to material assets as to personal ones. It’s helpful to understand what Mrs. Bennet means when she exclaims “What pin money…” Lizzy will have, or how Mrs. Jennings comes by her jointure. Amy Louise Erickson’s Woman and Property in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1993) takes the reader only to the early 18^th century, but otherwise is a very clear, and clearly documented, study of women’s rights to ownership of money and property as unmarried women, as wives and as widows, and the precise meaning of terms like “dower” and “settlement”, with some interesting case studies. As a counterpart, Susan Staves’ Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660-1833, studies four categories of women’s property: dower; jointure; separate property and pin money; allowance for maintenance.

A profession common to Austen’s novels was one with which she was personally familiar: the country clergyman. The church may be the profession of choice for the hero – Edmund Bertram, Henry Tilney – or it may be the comfortable resort of the self-important and the ambitious – Mr. Elton or Mr. Collins – or it may be the prospect of securing nothing better than the lowly curacy, which limits the aspirations of a young man like Charles Hayter or Edward Ferrars. If you are writing Austen, it does help to be somewhat familiar with what livings were (and when they provided enough to live on) as well as what a clergyman’s obligations were to his patron and his parish. Irene Collins’ Jane Austen and the Clergy (Hambledon and London, 2002) takes the reader through the education, obligations and living situations of the country clergyman and links what Austen must have observed: that the English clergy represented a variety of individuals, from those who were genuinely called to the vocation to those who did not have the talent or ambition to distinguish themselves in the military or the law. There is even the suggestion that those clergymen who are particularly animated – Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton – may have been so well-drawn because Austen saw them as a more accurate representation of the clergyman’s covetousness for a good living; even in Persuasion, there are schemes to oust poor Dr. Shirley, who has “zealously” discharged his duties for more than forty years, from his post in order to free up the Uppercross parish.

Among my favorite books about Austen’s work is Peter J. Leithart’s Miniatures and Morals; The Christian Novels of Jane Austen (Canon Press, 2004). (Chapter One is titled: Real Men Read Austen. What’s not to love?) Leithart describes the “miniaturist” nature of Austen’s writing, proclaiming that “…she does more with less than any other writer in English.” Like Lascelles, Leithart observes the relationship between syntax and character in Austen’s dialogue. Unlike Lascelles, Leithart defends the theory that Austen’s Christian morality is the underpinning of her narrative style; he even concludes that Austen is “a humorist because she is a moralist”, noting that, like Elizabeth Bennet, Austen “never mocks what is genuinely good.” After the initial introduction to Leithart’s analysis of Austen’s style, a chapter is devoted to each of her major novels in relation to the moral principles that determine not only the content, but literary style: morals and manners in Pride and Prejudice, charity in Emma, restraint in Sense and Sensibility and so on. Beyond Leithart’s cogent, and good-humored, analysis of Austen’s novels, is a well-organized format with each chapter beginning with a synopsis and ending with both “review questions” and “thought questions”. Not only should this be an essential on every Austen writer’s shelf, it would be an excellent text for an upper high school study of Austen’s work.

So, if you’re writing an Austenesque work, what books do you keep on the Austen section of your shelves?

     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.

So we all know about The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, right?  The P&P as a vlog that’s going on on Youtube as we speak?  I feel like we, as Jane Austen fans, need to discuss this.

BUT for those of us who have not seen LBD, it’s a vlog, or rather a web series that is essentially a modernize Pride and Prejudice.  Lizzie Bennet, now a 20-something grad student, decided to start a vlog with her best friend, Charlotte Lu because, hey, Lizzie’s going for a degree in communications, Charlotte wants to be a director/editor, and vlogging combines the best of both worlds.  Through the vlogs we also get to meet Lizzie’s two sisters, Jane, the sweetest fashionista to ever fashion, and Lydia, an over-enthusiastic party girl.  We also get to see Lizzie’s interpretation of her friends and family as she acts out various scenes from her daily life.  Like her mother and father debating over which of their still-single daughters to offer up to the rich med student who’s moved into the mansion down the street.

We have to marry them off or they’ll never leave the house!

So here are the 5 reasons why I think that The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is Awesome.

(more…)

“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.”

In glancing back at January’s focus on a few screen renderings of Sherlock Holmes adventures, I see that half of my subjects – The Blue Carbuncle and The Hound of the Baskervilles – addressed films adapted from Conan Doyle stories, and half – Murder By Decree and A Case of Evil – were original material incorporating the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Rathbone

Sherlock Holmes, as the subject of adaptations – pastiches, sequels, mash-ups, modernizations and assorted character cadging – has only one rival: Jane Austen, generally; Pride and Prejudice, particularly and Mr. Darcy, specifically. If Jane Austen derivative works outnumber Conan Doyle’s, it is only because some of Doyle’s property is still protected by copyright (in the US) and Austen’s work and characters are in the public domain. To an eager aspirant, “public domain” translates as “open season”; or, as Conan Doyle rather snappishly replied to William Gillette, when Gillette wanted to know if he might marry off Holmes in a stage adaptation, “You may marry him or murder him or do whatever you like with him.”

Williamson

Yet, given license to marry or murder or convert to vampires or transport to the twenty-first century, the nagging consideration is not, “What can we do?”, but “What should we do?” What license or should you take with a work or a character that was not of your own invention?

Cushing, as Holmes

In Edgar W. Smith’s cogent essay on the character of Sherlock Holmes- “The Implicit Holmes” – he asks, “What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?” and I think it’s that “what is it we love” that ought to define the limits of license. After all, haven’t Conan Doyle and Jane Austen – or, more specifically, Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Darcy – been singled out because they represent qualities that have a timeless appeal? And if that is true, should not special care be taken to retain those fundamental qualities even when the superficial trappings change?

Cushing, as Darcy

The first part of Smith’s essay defends the requisite of keeping Holmes in his era and place. Some may disagree; however, there was a social canon that shaped Holmes’s character (and Darcy’s) that risks appearing quaint, or alien or artificial when he is taken out of his time. Holmes and Darcy were gentlemen when “gentleman” described caste as well as conduct; when they are transplanted, their conduct may become irrelevant in the context of a modern setting, or is coarsened to adapt to a modern age. Even the Canon suggests this. In its most cringeworthy tale – The Adventure of the Three Gables – Holmes’s language and conduct are frequently appalling. So much so, that some scholars reject Conan Doyle’s authorship. The truth is more to the point – more to Smith’s point: The Three Gables was published in the late 1920s, when detective fiction inclined toward snappy dialogue and conditional morality. (Holmes could subscribe to conditional justice, but never conditional morality). In succumbing to the influence of a more modern style, Doyle’s Three Gables Sherlock is barely recognizable as the gentleman who was once prepared to commit an act that is “morally justifiable though technically criminal” because “a gentleman should not lay much stress upon [personal risk] when a lady is in most desperate need of his help”. Likewise, Darcy’s revulsion at the prospect of acquiring relations whose “condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own”, loses its credibility if he is taken out of his era, as does the extent of his chivalry when he lowers himself to “meet, to frequently meet, reason with, persuade and finally bribe” Wickham.

D'Arcy, as Holmes

Cumberbatch, as Holmes

For both characters, a re-imagining that cannot retain the fundamental blend of “Galahad and Socrates” (Smith’s phrase) risks losing what we love, however entertaining the substitute may be.

My first introduction to Elizabeth Barrett-Browning came through the Baby-sitter’s Club books.  Specifically, Babysitter;s Club #8, Boy-Crazy Stacey, where Stacey (the diabetic New Yorker) and Mary Ann (the shy one) are on vacation with the huge Pike clan as mothers helpers, except Stacey falls hard for a lifeguard (who’s in college, I think, ooooo….) and basically ditches Mary Ann to take care of the forty Pike children by herself.  Anyway, early on in the book everyone heads to Burger Garden and there’s a rush to see who doesn’t have to sit with Vanessa, the aspiring poet who rhymes every single sentence.  ”No one,” explains big sister Mallory, “wants to sit with Elizabeth Barrett-Browning.”  It then has to be explained to aspiring poet Vanessa that Elizabeth Barrett-Browning is a famous poet.  Of course, this only strikes me as weird now.

Except that these books are awesome.

Hangover Square is loosely based upon the novel by Patrick Hamilton, author of the plays Rope and Gaslight and the three novels known as the Gorse trilogy – “loosely based upon” defined as “very little remains of”, because screenwriter Barre Lyndon (The Lodger) converts Hamilton’s socio-political pre-WWII tale to an fin de siècle gothic melodrama, with the principal common element being the blackouts suffered by the main character George Harvey Bone. Hangover Square is directed by John Brahm (The Lodger) and stars Laird Cregar (Bone), playing pretty much the same role he played in The Lodger,

Cregar, in The Lodger

Cregar, in Hangover Square

George Sanders playing pretty much the same role he played in The Lodger,

Sanders, in The Lodger

Sanders, in Hangover Square

Linda Darnell and Faye Marlowe playing the role Merle Oberon played in The Lodger,

Faye Marlowe

Merle Oberon

and Alan Napier, who was not in The Lodger

The beloved character actor, Alan Napier

Periodically, one of Cregar’s films shows up, and cinephiliacs are reminded what as astonishing presence he was. There was an assurance, a finish to his performances that was not only in contrast to his size (he was 6’4″ and well over 300 pounds for much of his career), but to his youth – in five years, he made sixteen films, dying prematurely at age 31; Hangover Square was his last film. Cregar’s George Harvey Bone is a tormented wretch (another variant of not only his role in The Lodger, but in I Wake Up Screaming), a struggling composer suffering from blackouts that are triggered by discordant sounds. These lapses synch up with a string of unsolved murders, and on the advice of his patron’s daughter, Bone consults with a doctor attached to Scotland Yard; the doctor dismisses Bone’s fear that he may be the killer, but suggests that the stress of his in-progress concerto may be the cause of the blackouts. His prescription is for Bone to take a break (no pun intended) from his music and amuse himself among the common folk. Cut to an inebriated Bone in a seedy dance hall where Netta (Darnell) is performing. George becomes infatuated with Netta, who plays him along in order to persuade him to put a friend’s lyrics to music, providing her with material to boost her career. Soon poor besotted George has tabled his concerto (serious art) to crank out dance hall ditties (commercial entertainment) that bring Netta to the attention of a theatrical producer, who stars her in his next production:

Yes, you read that right

There is, of course, the long-suffering lady friend who is, in turn, befriended by the doctor, the avuncular father/mentor who dispenses advice, and a really terrific use of Guy Fawkes Day as a plot device. The superbly edited climax is fashioned around George’s performance of his concerto. The concerto and score were done by Bernard Hermann whose piercing flute that accompanies George’s spells is every bit as unnerving as his shrieking violins in Psycho.

So which Austen characters would enjoy Hangover Square? Marianne Dashwood would find something of a kindred spirit in a composer who dies for his art, Mary Bennet would empathize with Bone’s conflict when her long concerto is not received with as much “praise and gratitude” as her popular Scotch and Irish airs, Captain Benwick would certainly understand that even the most determined melancholy might be relieved by a lively and frivolous young lady and Catherine Morland would have relished all of the film’s atmosphere of eerie mystery.

Three degrees of Jane Austen? Laird Cregar co-starred in Charley’s Aunt with Edmund Gwenn, who played Mr. Bennet in the 1940 Pride and Prejudice.

The Duellists, based upon Joseph Conrad’s short story The Duel, was the first feature directed by Ridley Scott (Aliens, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down). The tale follows two soldiers in Napoleon’s army, Lieutenant Feraud (Harvey Keitel) and Lieutenant d’Hubert (Keith Carradine). The hot-blooded Feraud has gravely injured a relation of their garrison town’s mayor in a duel – an affront to the regiment’s host and to Napoleon’s rules of military conduct – and d’Hubert is dispatched by his superior to apprehend Feraud and to escort him to house arrest. In executing the order, d’Hubert gives offense, or at least, Feraud takesoffense and demands satisfaction. Their initial skirmish leaves Feraud unsatisfied, and for the next fifteen years, as their circumstances shift with the fortunes of war, whenever their regiments are quartered in the same location, Feraud summons up his unappeased, and unappeasable, umbrage and renews his demands for an increasingly inaccessible reparation.

Military braid

The structure of the film is episodic – there are scenes that attempt to give dimension to the pair, particularly d’Hubert, but it is all about the duels – with swords, with pistols, on horseback, on foot, all brilliantly choreographed. The timelessness of the film can be largely attributed to its superb attention to period detail. Yes, there are a few gaffes, but none of the oddly anachronistic hair (I’m thinking of the 1971 Persuasion), or clothing (thinking of the 1940 Pride and Prejudice) that dates a movie; released in 1977, it could pass for a film released in 2007.

Military braid?

So which Austen character would enjoy the film? The concept of a generation-long grudge would have appealed to Marianne Dashwood’s romantic imagination; Elinor would have found the ill-founded rancor to unreasonable, but as an artist, she would have appreciated the natural landscapes and authentic locations (no sets were built). Colonel Brandon would approve the manner of settling a dispute, even while he questioned the motive. Lydia Bennet would have been thrilled by the duels and bored with the rest, while Mr. Bennet’s estrangement from his cousin would have given him some understanding of hanging on to a grievance, he would be hard pressed to justify the exertion of a redress sought at the cost of even one duel, let alone several.

Three degrees of Jane Austen: Keith Carradine was featured in Mrs. Parker and The Vicious Circle with Gwyneth Paltrow, who starred in the 1996 Emma.

Here is a link to the first duel that sets off the chain of events: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhwIrONyEzg