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JANE AUSTEN by O.W. Firkins (1823)
New York, Henry Holt and Company
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The book opens with a dedication in form of a long, flattering poem, written to Jane Austen, presumably by the author.
This might just be a decoy - for the very next page begins by lashing out, not only at her first publication, and every major character therein, but at Jane Austen as well.
The author is acidic and happy to lash out in a language that would impress anyone reading this with his erudition and his well informed mind in matters of literature, for his day.
This book was published in 1823, presumably (- since that's the date attached to the title, in Jane Austen: Complete Works + Extras - 83 titles (Annotated and illustrated) by Jane Austen -), which was less than half a decade after Jane Austen's death. Perhaps he didn't realise what tasteless ignoramus he was going to reveal himself as, to posterity, for ever.
For he isn't satisfied with a contemptuous treatmentof the author, her writing and the characters; he is quite unabashed about abusing to categories of humanity she belongs to, as well - first, women, and next, English! That's the order of his abuse, whether or not it's the order Jane Austen belonged to those categories of humanity.
What's worse, this author isn't merely vituperative, he's throwing false interpretations along with abuses. In short, the author is an I'll- informed, ignorant Boro, incapable of understanding or growing, and seeks merely to abuse.
Firkins quotes a paragraph from Pride and Prejudice and comments.
""Charlotte herself was tolerably composed. She had gained her point, and had time to consider of it. Her reflections were in general satisfactory. Mr. Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband. Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage bad always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it."
"This may be questionable as ethics —it is certainly dismal as philosophy; but its art is consummate."
Was the man stupid or blind? Even in his day, even now, few women have a safe alternative to a double danger at every step in every direction - if they find a way to survive, that is!
One, an unattached woman is preyed on by most males, far more than those attached; this works in reference to situations as simple as a walk, and as long as life. Males refrain from behaving like beasts confronting an object of attack out of regard for the escorting male or husband, or, in some cultures and situations, a brother or father. The last two are rarely likely to be protectors for life.
Two, any woman who has in fact found a career, if it takes her out of her home, is likely to confront attacks of not necessarily completely sexual or completely asexual kind - these are primarily of the sort that target women for having stepped out of the housework and sexual service confine at all, into what is viewed as male domain, and use sex as a tool of attack, but are far more deadly. They aim to paralyse the object, and send her back, pathetic and frightened, to scurrying for cover of a pathetic male protector, and dead if she does not.
Firkins's attack against Jane Austen in form of this garbage book is in fact of exactly this sort. And that was years, century after she was dead.
Why? Because she had dared to not marry, have occupation other than housework, and succeed so brilliantly as to have her fame and esteem not only rise through her life but through centuries past,and not just with ordinary public out to read for pleasure. So this male, who nobody would hear of - he wrote nothing original - went to attack. His weapon is mostly garbage dressed in concepts that seem complex and verbiage that sounds high, but often simply any lie.
Was he aware of just how disgusting he was, in his attitude towards women?
" ... She had a woman's playful self-will, but even in the heyday and riot of her caprice she foresees its final subjection to a masculine equity. She has all manner of unreasoned dislikes, which she relinquishes with the most admirable candour and the most engaging reluctance."
She admired Scott for quality, idiot, not "submit" because he was male"; women may have reason to fear male due to misbehaviour coupled with social power, but they do not "submit" to males for reasons of "subjection to a masculine equity", any more than the idiot Firkin wouldn't "submit" to an attacking buffalo for reasons of superiority of the buffalo rather than of danger of life.
AVOID READING THIS BOOK.
It's not only that it's stupid, pretentious, vituperative and no good. It's much worse.
It's seriously misogynistic.
Why this, amongst very likely dozens - hundreds, wouldn't be surprising - of other writings on Jane Austen, the Complete Collection had to include this one, is incomprehensible. Change of taste, we understand all too well in India - we love a little, or even a lot, of spice. But acid, of this sort?!!!!
Excerpts of his acid are quoted below, but not all of it - that might amount to quoting the whole book.
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Table of contents
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Dedication
Part I – The Novelist
Chapter I – Sense and Sensibility
Chapter II – Pride and Prejudice
Chapter III – Northanger Abbey
Chapter IV – Mansfield Park
Chapter V – Emma
Chapter VI – Persuasion
Chapter VII – The Group of Novels
Part II – The Realist
Chapter VIII – The Realist
Part III – The Woman
Chapter IX – Life and Ways of Life
Chapter X – Liabilities and Assets
Chapter XI – Conclusion
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Review
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Chapter I – Sense and Sensibility
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" ... If Miss Austen had been a man, she would have enjoyed the vocation of a courier. ... "
" ... Miss Austen is after all so much wiser than her superflux of wisdom would suggest. The truth is that the novelist is as intensely social as she is conscientious, and if the essence of conscience is inflexibility, the essence of society is compromise. The rational woman is provisionally rational and ultimately woman."
"The twentieth century hardly knows what to do with a young woman to whom apostrophes of this type are feasible:"
Wasn't this published in 1823? Why was this guy saying "The twentieth century", in present tense "hardly knows what to do with a young woman"?
"And you, ye well-known trees —but you will continue the same. —No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer.
"In lines like these the satirised Mrs. Radcliffe is vindicated —or avenged. Even where the heart is stirred, the creaking of the eighteenth-century stays in which its throbbings are confined is distinctly audible."
" ... His adhesion to the pestiferous Lucy seems a dismal if not a truckling type of virtue, and the American reader is not propitiated by his naïve view of the ministry as a steppingstone to a living in the double sense of a rectory and a livelihood. It is quite true that in this view of the church as a refectory he has the cordial support of his patroness, Miss Austen."
" ... Miss Austen is too robustly English to view any convenience with unqualified contempt."
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Chapter II – Pride and Prejudice
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It's hard to imagine someone being vituperative about Pride and Prejudice, but then this author is even handed in his vituperation, pouring acid equally on Jane Austen, her works, English, and all of womanhood. Perhaps he was rejected by everyone he looked at, and this was before civil war as he had nothing else to do on his father's plantation, so why not abuse everyone?!!!
"I incline to rank Pride and Prejudice among the best-plotted novels in English literature. This is far from holding it to be impeccable. It is unfortunately true that a novel need not be faultless —need not be free from grave faults, to be classed with the best-woven fabrics of the clumsy English looms. English novelists commonly write on the grand scale which makes the correlation of particulars difficult and irksome, and in general they are eager or preoccupied. Like the man who had been so busy in making money that he had wanted time to think about finance, they have been so lost in narrative that they have almost forgotten plot; and their forethought, when it has existed, has been moral and intellectual rather than artistic. Even the aesthetic re-quickening in the last years of the nineteenth century came almost too late for the amelioration of their plots. They found themselves ready to appropriate the patterns of their continental masters at the very time when those masters were preparing to teach them that art is truth and that truth is patternless. Accordingly, a strong, definite, and shapely plot, like that of Pride and Prejudice, has never lacked the pedestal of isolation. For the most part the English have muddled through in novel-writing as in war. Lovers of literature will find solace in the thought that in the military field the habit has not acted as preventive to Blenheims and Trafalgars.
"The plot of Pride and Prejudice belongs to that admirable class in which two processes, a flux and reflux, of approximately equal length and strength, are parted in the middle by a crest or equinox in which the first process finds an end and the second a beginning. This is the type which proved so captivating to the imagination of Gustave Freytag that he was decoyed into the error of making it an imperative formula for tragic drama. In Miss Austen's novel, Elizabeth Bennet accumulates dislike of Darcy throughout a volume; throughout a second volume she accumulates love; the arch finds its beautifully poised keystone in the rejection scene in which her aversion touches its acme. The manner of these changes is highly characteristic. The word "process" which I have applied to the movements is inexact, they are no more processes than a flight of steps or a series of ledges is an incline. The graduated is achievable by Miss Austen, but not the gradual. Elizabeth, in the first volume, collects evidence of Darcy's wickedness; in the second she collects evidence of his worth: and this evidence comes not in grains but in blocks. As soon as the rebuttal is complete, so strict a logician cannot delay the bestowal of the hand which is the irrefutable Q. E. D. Yet it is by no means unpleasing or unexciting to watch the deliberate movements of the crane by which block after block is swung into its due place in the massive lines of Miss Austen's geometric masonry."
" ... Even the general plan of the two movements is a departure from the truth, and owes all its brilliant virtuosity to the imposition on life of a symmetrical elegance to which life itself is uncompromisingly hostile. Of itself, it would block Miss Austen's claim to the title of an inexorable realist.
"The differences in merit between Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice are emphasised in one point by the similarity of their materials. There are two sisters with two parallel love-affairs in both noels. But in Sense and Sensibility the union of the stories has little other basis than the union of the heroines, as if two lapdogs became companions rather than partners through the fact that their mistresses were inseparable. ... The differences in merit between Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice are emphasised in one point by the similarity of their materials. There are two sisters with two parallel love-affairs in both noels. But in Sense and Sensibility the union of the stories has little other basis than the union of the heroines, as if two lapdogs became companions rather than partners through the fact that their mistresses were inseparable."
Jane pursue Bingley is as false, of course, as Mariane pursue Willoughby - the one thing they shared is lack of wherewithal, and when invited to visit with friends, options were acceptance if one wished to not become a recluse in country, or rejection and a possibility of ever lonely life - which is different from merely being single. Jane, moreover, visited her aunt and uncle; this was as respectable and normal as it could get. Did she know Bingley would not be elsewhere, visiting Darcy or Scotland or Italy? No, they weren't corresponding.
This author isn't merely vituperative, he's throwing false interpretations along with abuses.
"The Gardiners are entirely subordinate, but they are enlisted in the plot three times; they serve as hosts to Jane, as escorts to Elizabeth, as helpers to Lydia. An ordinary novelist would have treated such auxiliaries as porters or hackmen to be changed at every station."
Gardiner was a very close relative, his wife a friend of the two elder daughters of her sister in law. But perhaps the author didn't experience family.
" ... if reared in one household, they can hardly differ in manners as Rosalind differs from Audrey in As You Like It or as Romola differs from Tessa in George Eliot's Florentine story. Breeding, being more superficial, is more teachable and less variable than either intellect or character. The two eldest and the two youngest sisters in the Bennet household are divided by an incongruity of this type."
Here's a person who, despite being from "a free country", fails to comprehend that people, even babies of same parents, are individuals, not identical blocks of concrete poured and moulded to specifications. Obviously he wrote this when he had yet to experoence a family, whether of siblinfs or children or relatives or neibours, else he ought to have known siblings differ. Period.
"But Mr. Bennet's lot was less fortunately cast, amid earthier and grosser conditions, on a social order in which the farm-horse took the girls to fashionable parties."
Spoken like a good for nothing son of a wealthy Southern owner of a large plantation who doesn't know anything of English - or anywhere - country life.
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Chapter III – Northanger Abbey
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" ...The author wishes to reprove the romanticism of a fiction-reading young girl. ... "
"Catherine Morland is not even a romantic character; she seems intended as a rebuke and corrective to romance."
Reasonable perception so far, but soon the author - Firkins - returns to his stupidity and acid.
" ... Her first exploit, on venturing into the world, is to fall instantly and irreparably in love with a young man whose main attraction is his raillery, and the prime object of whose raillery is the absurdities of the producers and consumers of romance. At the end of the book she marries this young man, magnanimously overlooking his possession of a large income and an enviable position. ... "
"The plot, though scant, is spacious enough to include two gross improbabilities, that the general should be prepared to risk his son's happiness with a girl whose fortune was attested only by rumour, and that he should brave the tongues of the county by an act of violence which stamped him as dupe no less than ruffian."
" ... the general should be prepared to risk his son's happiness with a girl whose fortune was attested only by rumour ... "???
If a man goes so far as to invite a girl to his home, in an attempt to arrange a marriage of his son, only because he's heard she had money, where does concern for the sons happiness come in?
And equally, who ever said the general cared about what people said or thought?
" ... Catherine, whose ignorance at eighteen is abysmal ... "
Isn't that true of most kids at eighteen, even in most cities of U.S., now, not just country clergymen's daughters in England when they didnt go to school, for most part?
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Chapter IV – Mansfield Park
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"In Mansfield Park there is a concentration which contrasts pleasantly with the width and diversity which give the character of polypi to Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park is frame as well as title; for most of the book the fixture of the story at the park seems as unchangeable as that of Lady Bertram herself, and the removal of the tale to Portsmouth, with the other baggage of Fanny Price, surprises us almost to the point of dismay. We had grown so used to acres and turbot. Again, the characters in the novel are relatively few, and form what may be called a closed circuit. ... the sense of distance in proximity, of peril in an asylum, which follows the reader throughout this reassuring and disquieting tale."
So far so good; one begins to hope the author won't spew acid and possibly he merely disliked her more successful works. But no.
" ... Miss Austen, who has a taste for wine, indulgence for cards, and approbation for balls, and who had seen her own kinsfolk taking part in private theatricals in her father's barn, is inexorable in her reprobation of the sport. ... "
" ... Henry Crawford rides away to Bath. The brusqueness of his treatment of Maria seems almost copied by Miss Austen in her cavalier desertion of an affair with which she has lingeringly and solicitously dallied. ... "
" ... Miss Austen probably made the confection to please the sprightly, and later discovered its virtue as cough medicine in order to placate the discreet.
"Mansfield Park is Fanny Price's book; indeed its faithfulness to Fanny is almost canine. It is a technical flaw perhaps that a book which scarcely leaves Fanny's side should admit a brief dialogue here and there from which she is shut out. ... "
"Fanny, at the time when we see most of her, is eighteen, absolutely ignorant of the world, shrinking and docile to an appealing, almost a pathetic, degree. But her mind is about twenty years older than her physique or her character. She is set down in the Mansfield Park circle as Miss Austen's delegate and mouthpiece. She observes with Miss Austen's keenness, and condemns with Miss Austen's severity. We are disconcerted by the hardihood with which this fragile and trembling girl holds out in her own mind against the judgment of the very persons who, so far as we can see, are responsible for the formation of her judgment."
But he gets horrible in one fell swoop, as if acid weren't enough.
" ... What is Miss Austen's expedient for helping the child of a drunken father and a slipshod mother? Apparently she has nothing to suggest but adoption into a rich family. When told that the French poor had no bread, Marie Antoinette is said to have replied: "Why, then, let them eat cake." I have no doubt that Miss Austen would have been duly amused at the artlessness or heartlessness of the young queen's reply."
So Firkins not only approves of beheading of the French royals, and only because the teenager who came to France to marry the Dauphin was a Princess from the mighty Austrian Empire, daughter of the formidable Empress, so she didn't know about bread or price thereof; but he - Firkins - is also suggesting Jane Austen deserves this, too?
Fortunately she wasn't living when he published this, in 1823!
Author gives another proof of his lack of perception, as if it were needed after his treatment of Jane Austen and her first two publications.
" ... One of those sicknesses which flourish in the third volumes of novels, with a view to the inducement of repentance in the hero or relenting in the heroine, waylays Tom Bertram; a moral convalescence accompanies the physical, which Miss Austen, whose respect for truth is highly variable, prolongs beyond the date of recovery."
He's missed it. And here's once more Firkin comes close to open insolence towards an author he coukd no more approach height of than a man suntanning on a Caribbean beach could tower over Matterhorn simultaneously.
" ... Crawford is the leisurely, the placid, the indolently supple ladykiller, the huntsman to whom the chase is more than the game, and his elegance in the saddle more than the chase. With Fanny his heart is touched, and alacrity is more apparent. I do not know whether Miss Austen is blind to the real insolence of the means he adopts in his pursuit of Fanny —means which reek with latent insult and which would settle his fate once for all with any spirited woman. I incline to think that Miss Austen views his wooing as refined and diplomatic. ... "
And he's determined to give yet another evidence of his stupidity.
" ... The elopement of Henry Crawford and Maria Rushworth in a story of this kind is like the firing of a pistol shot at an afternoon tea. ... "
It's nothing of the sort, not even very surprising, unless one really didn't pay any attention whatsoever whik e reading, and only thought continually about how to attack Jane Austen.
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Chapter V – Emma
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Acid continues, along with unconcealed stupidity of the ignoramus that Firkins keeps exposing his being as, without any self consciousness - couldn't be without consciousness, coukdnt it!
"The claim of Emma to the second place among Miss Austen's novels seems to me as incontestable as its failure to compete with Pride and Prejudice for the honour of the first. ... nobody, with the doubtful exception of the two Knightleys, has much to do; and the story resigns itself with the other inhabitants of Highbury to that poverty of incident and defect of bustle which is the price paid by small villagers for security and comfort."
So Firkins seniors refusal to sponsor junior living in N.Y. at his, seniors, expenses, has the author frustrated into imagining residents of country villages of Europe staffing at chains binding them to their homes and lands?!!!
Blind, again -
"The young clergyman proving ungrateful, nourishing indeed a most unseasonable passion for the patroness ... "
There was no passion, idiot, not even a real inclination or liking, any more than he would have had for any other daughter of any other rich man around!
" ... I cannot but feel that this world must be far better and far better-natured than it now is before a mere flick of satire at another person's obvious and obtrusive folly can deserve the avalanche of reprobation which Emma receives for her treatment of Miss Bates. ... "
Spoken like a true slave owner, rebuked by an aghast observer from North whose consequent breaking off an engagement is seen by Firkins as an exaggeration?
But there's more!
" ... His interest in the marriage of a young farmer with a village girl engrosses him to the point of quarrelling with the woman he loves in its behalf."
Firkins seems to imply, from his criticism of Darcy and Knightley, that it's not merely prudent but necessary, to keep silent about serious ethical or moral matters, where a man's interest in an eligible young woman is concerned - even if it were about a serious matter of life of another person!
And more exposing of his own ignorance, or thoughtless abuse, or both, by Firkin -
" ... Mrs. Elton should be humbled. Nothing of the sort occurs; Mrs. Elton is secretly abominated, but, openly, she is tolerated and deferred to by everybody on the premises. Mr. Knightley is taciturn; Emma is acquiescent; Jane Fairfax is submissive; Miss Bates is idolatrous. The form of portrayal does not show Miss Austen at her very best. ... "
The dumb guy fails to remember he's reading about a polite civilisation of a small country setting in England, and the clergymen's wife, who must be treated well! Not because she has money, or another reason of status, but simply that she's related by her marriage to religion of the village, so to speak! What would someone insulting her do, stop going to church for ever, dispensing with the services of her husband including at his own funeral? Firkins forgets it's not about rough West where one shoots and rides off!
And yet more -
"His profession clearly sets no bound to it in the eyes of the creator of the Reverend Mr. Collins. Mr. Elton's calling, like Mr. Collins's, appears to be removable like his surplice and with his surplice. He is not merely not religious; he is not even clerical."
Firkins wrote, and published, a book on Jane Austen, and her works, with no clue about England, church of England, or society of country; no clue about the clergy, and yet he continues making personal attacks.
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Chapter VI – Persuasion
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Firkins seems to be tired of limiting his vituperation to Jane Austen, her works, characters therein, women in general, or English society; so he extends it to humanity, or those who read.
" ... Even the exertions of a novelist can no longer keep the lovers apart, but the contrivance by which understanding is brought about is so clumsy and artificial that perhaps it ought not to surprise us to hear that it has been warmly admired. ... "
Firkins borders on obscene when he goes -
" ... Miss Austen's work in Persuasion may be described as teasing the reader, finding excuse after excuse for withholding from him a satisfaction which she is almost as eager to grant as he to obtain. ... "
This, at best, is in accord with U.S. habit of identifying a baby as male, when dealing with discussions about mother's and babies. At worst, it's implied porn. And an attack against Jane Austen, and implied threat against any woman who may choose to write.
" ... Anne is twenty-seven, and is supposed to have lost her bloom, but on this delicate point there is a vacillation that shakes our faith in Miss Austen's vigilance. The loss of beauty has gone so far that Frederick Wentworth, after a separation of eight years, finds her "altered beyond knowledge," or at best "wretchedly altered." At Lyme, not long after this, her appearance has mended to the point of making a deep and lasting impression on the mind of a virtual stranger —a cousin who sees her for the first time without knowing of the cousinship. Miss Austen feels that these are dubious procedures, and falters out something about the west wind and its reparative power upon faded beauty. It is clear that we have all underrated the west wind."
Austen was referring to West wind in Lyme, which Firkins knows as little of as he dies of England. But he should know the obvious, without Jane Austen stating it. Wentworth had an image in his mind of someone at nineteen, blooming additionally in love; she's not merely twenty-five when he sees her next, but has had effect of pining and regret. The cousin who sees her, without knowing she's his cousin, is seeing her for the first time, and is struck by her beauty. That's not difficult to understand. Loss of bloom and colour is about youth, but her fundamental beauty is retained.
" ... that he should insist that another man —even a man past fifty —is recreant to his social obligations unless he flaunts a handsome face, is outside of nature, as nature is conceived by a Western American like myself."
One, a review isn't about one's personal likes and dislikes, and Firkins never understood this; he isn't being served in a restaurant, he is reading about characters and lives that obviously do not populate his neighbourhood. If he can't understand, and dislikes it, he should in good taste let it go at that. Two, a country gentleman in England, and a Baronet at that, is allowed far more eccentricity than a man in U.S. who is forced to get along with the sparsely populated areas and the few neighbours, especially in West or South, and this forced conformity is quite familiar; it produces the bible belt, flat earth society and more. Renaissance could only happen in West Europe.
Three, U.S. isn't exactly famous for smooth and courteous relationship between races, and even now, protests about "white" cops killing non"white"s -as if humans, like animals or birds, could be white! - are treated as riots, bringing more killings. Jane Austen has the Baronet talk of beauty; Firkins fails to understand that Europe had an intermingling of races, with conquering races different from indigenous, that began to hsve a semblance of a fluidity rather than uniformity of race, only because of droit de seigneur, and not due to freedom of choosing a partner, especially out of caste - which, supposedly existing in U.S., is only in the affirmation, not in practice.
" ... If Miss Austen does not actually begin to draw Louisa, at least we can see her biting the end of her pencil. ... "
As stated by her various relatives, she only used a pencil - to write; one can't imagine she bit it, or held it in anything but fingers - when she lacked the strength to wield a pen, a few days before her death; but then she inked it over when she could. The habit of doing serious work, including submitting examination papers, written in pencil, is distinctly a U.S. tradition. So might too be the biting bit.
" ... It is rather curious that the only novelist, I suppose, in English literature who had two brothers in the admiralty should paint sailors so emphatically in their unprofessional capacity, their capacity as gentlemen. ... "
Obviously again Firkins shows his ignorance - of not only england and society thereof, but any concept of a society that involves ladies and gentlemen, not bar brawls in his neighbourhood. Jane Austen was a part of such a society, former not latter, with gentry and clergy, academia and aristocracy forming its boundaries; her brothers were brought up in this set-up, as was she. If they used lingo expected by Firkins, and that's a big if, it wouldn't be at home on land in presence of ladies.
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Chapter VII – The Group of Novels
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"The full criticisms I have given to the plots of the several novels will enable me to abridge my comments on the Austen plots. I may say, in word, that Sense and Sensibility reads like the 'prentice-work of a born expert; Pride and Prejudice speaking broadly, is unreservedly excellent; Northanger Abbey begins with mature power, only to relapse into juvenility; Mansfield Park, in its cemented love-affairs, is a much reduced but appreciable success on the same lines as Pride and Prejudice; Emma is a half lucky, half unlucky, shift to a newer and looser method; Persuasion is an unqualified failure. I speak solely with reference to plot."
Firkins wasted his time in reading Jane Austen, and he wasted time - and money, in most cases, if one paid for his work - of his readers; he ought to have restricted himself to strictly his home turf, wild West, with possible exceptions of likes of Treasure Island.
"Did Miss Austen read aloud her own paragraphs? ... "
"Miss Austen is not ringing each sentence on the counter of her ear, as a usurer tests coins to make sure of their claim to acceptance."
Firkins is being silly, expecting his own usual to be reflected in literature of England. And it might have not been so, but yes, the Austens read books aloud in company at home, whether within family or including visiting neighbours and friends. This included works of Jane Austen, and she was very much a stickler for natural, as affirmed in her letters. Firkins expects his time and era to be seen universally as the only alternative. If he doesn't speak thus, no one should write thus. How did he tolerate Shakespeare, or bible?
" ... Miss Austen liked style very well, but I think she liked ease and liked speed, and the English in her last three novels is the mixed result of these diverging tendencies. ... "
And yet her ardent fans include likes of Walter Scott, and more than one have compared her to Shakespeare.
Anybody heard of Firkin, lately?
Ever?
" ... Diana of the Crossways would have been a completer woman in 1900 than in 1800, and Jane Austen's style might have been bettered not so much by the instruction as by the countenance of the fashions exemplified in Macaulay and Thackeray."
Ah, yes, those fans of Jane Austen, Macaulay and Thackeray.
"Jane Austen's diction is of a lustrous purity, and her grammar is normally sound. It is a natural grammar, flowing like a spring out of the soil of her native Kent, not let in by pedagogic irrigation."
One, England takes priority in pedagogy of English literature, grammar, and all but local colour when describing West or U.S. in general; two, her native wasn't Kent. Ancestral a few generations back, but that would just as well include other neighbourhoods, and one of the Oxbridge colleges if not both the universities.
Funny, Firkins quoting Galsworthy as an author - so why does the Complete Works of Jane Austen have his, Firkin's, work dated 1823? Googling it gives, by Open Library, 1920 as publication date.
On the other hand, this explains his talking of twentieth century. But then he is writing not immediately, not a handful of years but a century, after her death, and had to be aware of high esteem Jane Austen has been held in, her fame and esteem only rising. That puts his vituperation in quite another light, that of a dwarf looking up and deliberately spitting at Mont Blanc just to be noticed.
Firkins criticises Jane Austen's English, giving examples of her usage of "were" and "which", but in those examples she's using the words properly, as per strictly taught English; then again, it's Firkin who belongs where language is named English but shouldn't be, it's been changed so much, as one famous author (Mark Twain, or ...?) said - they are two nations separated by a language; so much so, famously Canadians are said to feel like children of divorced parents! And that's how they sound, too, unlike Australians.
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Part II – The Realist
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Chapter VIII – The Realist
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More Firkins.
Firkins quotes a paragraph from Pride and Prejudice and comments.
""Charlotte herself was tolerably composed. She had gained her point, and had time to consider of it. Her reflections were in general satisfactory. Mr. Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband. Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage bad always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it."
"This may be questionable as ethics —it is certainly dismal as philosophy; but its art is consummate."
Was the man stupid or blind? Even in his day, even now, few women have a safe alternative to a double danger at every step in every direction - if they find a way to survive, that is!
One, an unattached woman is preyed on by most males, far more than those attached; this works in reference to situations as simple as a walk, and as long as life. Males refrain from behaving like beasts confronting an object of attack out of regard for the escorting male or husband, or, in some cultures and situations, a brother or father. The last two are rarely likely to be protectors for life.
Two, any woman who has in fact found a career, if it takes her out of her home, is likely to confront attacks of not necessarily completely sexual or completely asexual kind - these are primarily of the sort that target women for having stepped out of the housework and sexual service confine at all, into what is viewed as male domain, and use sex as a tool of attack, but are far more deadly. They aim to paralyse the object, and send her back, pathetic and frightened, to scurrying for cover of a pathetic male protector, and dead if she does not.
Firkins's attack against Jane Austen in form of this garbage book is in fact of exactly this sort. And that was years, century after she was dead.
Why? Because she had dared to not marry, have occupation other than housework, and succeed so brilliantly as to have her fame and esteem not only rise through her life but through centuries past,and not just with ordinary public out to read for pleasure. So this male, who nobody would hear of - he wrote nothing original - went to attack. Hus weapon is mostly garbage dressed in concepts that seem complex and verbiage that sounds high, but often simply any lie.
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Part III – The Woman
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Chapter IX – Life and Ways of Life
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"In this final section I shall treat of Jane Austen's personality with glances at certain literary traits to which that personality is closely related. Miss Austen is perhaps the poorest subject for biography of all notable persons who have lived since biography began to flourish. Her family was large, her acquaintance not small; she was part of a peering, listening, gossiping community; and forty-two years in one district and four towns should have supplied a field for the accumulation of reminiscence. But her life was barren of events; her fame, when it tardily arrived, was shy; and curiosity awoke only after its nutriment had vanished. She died in 1817; the memoir of her nephew, J. E. Austen-Leigh, published in 1870, was the first attempt to present her life in narrative. In respect of material that memoir is famished, though the grace and exquisite humility with which the little repast is served leave us obliged even by its meagreness. The taste and loyalty, if not the grace, of the memoir-writer was bequeathed to his son and grandson, William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, who published in 1913 the Life and Letters of Jane Austen. The life-story yielded scarcely anything to further pressure; but, in view of Jane's own destitution on this score, a purse of facts, if I may hazard the expression, was made up in her behalf to which every ancestor, relative, and acquaintance was bidden to contribute his mite. ... "
Firkins must share the ambition of leading "she was part of a peering, listening, gossiping community", with people who successfully pretend to themselves they are independent, analytical, and impartial, all based on their physiology, rather than the malicious gossip hunters that they in fact are.
Firkins begins by setting down facts known about life and person of Jane Austen, from number of children her mother had (- eight, including the third son George who is mentioned in Jane Austen, Life And Letters, as born, and later subject to fits, but never recovered; the authors of that book, descendents of the brother who took the name Leigh attached to Austen, do mention that George lived on until 1827), to the list of food and drink she enjoyed (gleaned from her letters to her sister).
He does not - of course! - refrain, from snide remarks about her love life, what can be gleaned from accounts by various relatives.
"Miss Austen's love-affairs, so far as present evidence goes, present nothing that need detain or agitate the biographer. The industry of her relatives has come upon traces of two flirtations, of which Jane herself speaks with a matter-of-fact and reassuring lightness. Her niece, Caroline, is voucher for another story of Jane's acceptance of an income and position overnight and her rejection next morning of the human being with whom these advantages were encumbered. There is still another pointless story of a young man attractive to Jane who was expected to reappear and whose failure to meet expectations was the effect of a rendezvous with death. There is every reason to believe that Miss Austen in her youth had a girl's fondness for society, attention, and, very possibly, flirtation, and there is no reason to suppose that her aversion to matrimony was of the kind which suitable pressure from an eligible quarter would have failed to conquer. Her person is said to have been very attractive. I quote from the author of the memoir."
"In the dearth of biography I shall use the letters as the basis of a sketch of Jane's habits and interests, not shrinking from a little detail, which is more likely to surprise than to fatigue the reader."
"In the dearth of biography I shall use the letters as the basis of a sketch of Jane's habits and interests, not shrinking from a little detail, which is more likely to surprise than to fatigue the reader."
After details about food, he goes on to drink, hoping to perhaps shock some of his readers who expect a woman to survive on air.
"Jane did not confine her partialities to imported liqueurs (they had liqueurs even in her day). The authoress whose peculiarity in literature was her fondness for the English domestic home-brew was true to her principles in the matter of drinks. She likes mead, and writes in 1813: "I find time in the midst of port and Madeira to think of the fourteen bottles of mead very often." She turns from the perfunctory mention of a pianoforte to the heart-felt cry: "We hear now that there is to be no honey this year. Bad news for us. We must husband our present stock of mead." Mead divided her affections with spruce beer. It was a period in which the variety of beverages at the same meal was sometimes interestingly great. Mrs. Austen reports a breakfast in which tea, coffee, and chocolate were served. ... "
And as he proceeds to her clothes, Firkins remains assiduously disgusting in his efforts to pour contempt on Jane Austen, hoping his readers will admire him in sharing it - even where, objectively, there is nothing to criticise her!
"If Jane was English in her respect for aliment, she was woman in her emphasis on dress. She is no more frivolous in her care for clothes than she is animal in her stress on nutriment; both are merely articles in the treaty which she made at the outset with things as they are. In relation to clothes her sentiment shows more of the zeal of the partisan than of the gravity of the devotee. They mix good-naturedly enough with more ethereal interests. "I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, and have nothing else to do." Literature and dress are associated after another fashion in the following mention of a cap. "It will be white satin and lace, and a little white flower perking out of the left ear, like Harriet Byron's feather." Jane's interest in caps is inextinguishable. She wears a black cap to a ball to the probable admiration of everybody in the room, even at the time of life when she could dance twenty dances without fatigue and imagine herself dancing for a week together. She and her sister were thought to have taken to caps and the other ensigns of middle age earlier than their years or their looks required."
"Animal"?? Because she didn't confirm to his Southern plantation boy expectations of women, and subconsciously believed the pretence that women don't eat?
Firkins speaks disdainfully of "the mutual attitude of mistress and servant in America", which implies, of course, an attitude of male ownership of, not merely superiority over, both.
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Firkins is getting ready for serious targeting with these practice potshots.
"A woman to whom the fact meant so much would affect no delicate indifference to money, and the letters and novels agree in testifying to the weight that Jane Austen gave to pounds. Money is never lightly spoken of, either by the most sensible or the most romantic persons in her books, and even people like Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars, whose love is sincere and profound, are perfectly clear as to the relation of income to well-being. ... "
Only someone whose existence does not depend on, or be seriously affected by, an amount of money in question, would speak lightly of that amount of money. That would include a monk who is not supposed to deal with money, or anyone whose life and wellbeing is assured without being affected by the amount in question.
As for the characters he mentions, neither had property; the senior heir had kept the Dashwood property, with so little left to the widow and three daughters that the story began with their meagre circumstances. And Edward Ferrets was disinherited by his mother on learning of his engagement, which he refused to give up due only to his honour, which subsequently was somewhat remedied by Elinore recommending his case to Brandon who provided him a living. It's all very well being snide for likes of Firkins, but a couple in love doesn't look forward to begging for food for children after marrying. Firkins living in West in U.S. might have survived by hunting, but this wasn't possible in England. Poaching was as much a crime in England as horse theft in U.S., although poachers weren't executed in England, as horse thieves were in U.S..
" ... Miss Austen's attitude toward money, while neither idolatrous nor abject, is definable as homage. She was neither a Fanny Dashwood nor a Mrs. Norris, but money was for her one of the great good facts of life in the savour and brightness of which her imagination fondly rested. She says in one letter: "I shall keep my ten pounds to wrap myself up in." The reference is naturally to apparel, but I think Jane would have been quite capable of nestling cosily into the warm wrappage of a snug income. "My father is doing all in his power to increase his income by raising his tithes, etc., and I do not despair of getting very nearly six hundred a year ... "
The reference to ten pounds is humour, and one to six hundred is dead serious, since it was supposed to support four people, occasional visitors, and pay rent; Firkins does not care to mention, if he knew anything about, which he probablydid not, how far did the said amounts go in Jane Austen's day. After the father's death, the income was down to two hundred; without what Firkins terms as charity from her brother Edward Knight Austen, which was his providing the family a home at a place of their selection on his property either at Chawton or in Kent, they would have not done with comfort.
Firkins is disgusting enough to keep quoting instances about money from Jane Austen's letters just to heap contempt, even where most people would not only understand and call it rational (such as her being clear about high stakes in cards being unaffordable - so if his ideal was opposite, why didn't Firkins shoot himself in head after a serious poker game before writing this garbage book? because he always cheated, of course, and shot everybody else if caught out? of course! ), but worse, questioning it where humour was clear, and implying seriously that she was base (when she writes about the brother, who had given them a house, giving her some money).
Then, in an effort to clear himself, he points fingers at his readers about thinking bad of Jane Austen by misinterpreting him, and goes on to badmouthing other "women like George Eliot and Mrs. Browning", which does it twice over - do we have to be reminded they were women? Why do disgusting people have their heads in everybody's pants??!!!
"If the above paragraphs produce the impression that Miss Austen was grasping or parsimonious, they have been unskilfully written. The delicacy — the interest —of the situation lies in the fact that Miss Austen was all that these paragraphs imply without being either grasping or parsimonious. The thought of money raised in her mind a glow not unlike that which the sight of fire awakens in a chilly person in a fickle climate; that glow does not imply that its owner will monopolise the cheer of the hearth or will be niggardly of coals to freezing neighbours. Such a feeling in relation to money indicates nothing worse than the abeyance of lethargy of those higher spiritual interests which, in women like George Eliot and Mrs. Browning, preoccupy the imagination and the feelings, and reduce money to the condition of a railway ticket —a thing to be at once guarded and despised."
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Did Firkins seriously set out to be fraudulent, thinking his readers were stupid enough?
" ... She is rather captious with Scott. "Walter Scott has no business to write novels especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people." "I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but fear I must.""
Unless, of course, he really was stupid enough to not see humour.
Was he aware of just how disgusting he was, in his attitude towards women?
" ... She had a woman's playful self-will, but even in the heyday and riot of her caprice she foresees its final subjection to a masculine equity. She has all manner of unreasoned dislikes, which she relinquishes with the most admirable candour and the most engaging reluctance."
She admired Scott for quality, idiot, not "submit" because he was male"; women may have reason to fear male due to misbehaviour coupled with social power, but they do not "submit" to males for reasons of "subjection to a masculine equity", any more than the idiot Firkin wouldn't "submit" to an attacking buffalo for reasons of superiority of the buffalo rather than of danger of life.
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Chapter X – Liabilities and Assets
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He reads Jane Austen with no comprehension whatsoever.
"She viewed it very much as she viewed the fruits on the ladies' hats in Bath. She had good eyes, and she knew perfectly well that the grapes and cherries of the feminine headgear were not edible grapes and cherries. But, so far as we know, it never occurred to her that they were not right because they were not real, or that they were less legitimate in their own way than the fruit which pleased the taste and fed the body. A real cherry on a hat would have been, not honest, but absurd. Now Miss Austen was a person who grasped things, and when a sham came in her way, she took hold of it with the admirable solidity and downrightness with which she grasped the actualities of life."
What she says is
" ... Flowers are very much worn, and fruit is still more the thing. Elizabeth has a bunch of strawberries, and I have seen grapes, cherries, plums, and apricots. There are likewise almonds and raisins, French plums, and tamarinds at the grocers', but I have never seen any of them in hats. A plum or greengage would cost three shillings; cherries and grapes about five, I believe, but this is at some of the dearest shops. ... "
It's clearly funny, and she meant it that way - it should be clear when she mentions tamarind, but she makes sure to mention grocer, as well, so as to avoid confusion. Well, she did not expect stupidity of Firkins's level, not in published books!
" ... It is doubtful if she read enough to command that virtual solitude of which the persevering reader is master or mistress. Her books were written in secret, but the shifts to which she resorted for the maintenance of this secrecy are of the degree to which her life was enveloped and permeated by the life of the household. ... "
Firkin, with his theory of women being less than males in areas of mind, coukdnt possibly have allowed any life of mind to his wife or daughter, if he had any; bring Western U.S. male, it's hard to imagine what he'd do to them if they read, much less seriously so. As for Jane and her sister, even their mother, they did read, after housework was taken care of, and often together, as custom was in gentry homes of an evening before and after dinner. They read together, too. She read Scott, apart from lighter fare of the day, and had been schooled by her father, and older brother James who'd returned a scholar from Oxford. From her writing, it's clear where she stands. It's far above Firkins, as clear from his.
" ... It is probable that Jane's respect for this order whose extremities and eccentricities she allowed herself to satirise was at bottom unshakable; and it was this esteem for the whole that gave point to her quarrel with the particulars. ... "
By that logic, Firkins must have been a slaveowner, since he did not rebel and go become a Buddhist in Africa! Jane Austen enjoying her life, her society seems objectionable to him because, what, she wasn't Karl Marx? Any reader of her books can see she is showing limitations of this life of country, especially for women; but Firkins is blind, or pretending to be so just so he can target her.
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Chapter XI – Conclusion
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More verbiage, where Firkins holds back acid a tad, but drivel he is determined to not stop, and drivel it is.
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September 10, 2021 - September 12, 2021.
Jane Austen
by Oscar W. Firkins
Kindle Edition, 123 pages
Published July 7th 2017
by Jazzybee Verlag
(first published August 22nd 2015)
ASIN:- B073SF1BJY
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