Reviews - Books I Read - DRJG: JANE AUSTEN - Complete Works –EXTRAS: Criticism

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Jane Austen: Complete Works

+ Extras - 83 titles

(Annotated and illustrated)

by Jane Austen.

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–EXTRAS: Criticism–

THE NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN (1859)

EXCERPT FROM Criticism and Fiction (1891)

THE PERFECTION OF THE NOVEL by William Edward Simonds (1894)

FROM FIELDING TO JANE AUSTEN by Williams James Dawson (1905)

JANE AUSTEN, AND THE NOVEL OF SOCIAL COMEDY by Williams James Dawson (1905)

MISS AUSTEN from the New Monthly Magazine (1852)

JANE AUSTEN by Anna Waterston (1863)

HUNTING FOR SNARKES AT LYME REGIS from Fanny Caroline Lefroy (1879)

IS IT JUST? from Fanny Caroline Lefroy (1883)

A BUNDLE OF LETTERS by Fanny Caroline Lefroy (1883)

MISS AUSTEN'S COUNTRY (1875)

STYLE AND MISS AUSTEN by Mary Augusta Ward (1884)

AN EXCERPT FROM Memoirs of John Murray by Samuel Smiles (1891)

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS by Andrew Lang (1892)

A GIRL'S OPINION ON JANE AUSTEN by Edith Edlmann (1892)

A JANE AUSTEN LETTER by M. A. De Wolfe Howe (1925)

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THE NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN

by George Henry Lewes (1859)

From Blackwood's Magazine.

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This was written over a century and six decades ago, a few decades after the time of Jane Austen's books being read first; they were successful as soon as they were published, but her name was not known in connection with them except to her intimate circle, that of her family - it wasn't published then. Her books were read widely, her esteem grew, but it took time before her name was known. This author begins with this phenomenon.

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"For nearly half a century England has possessed an artist of the highest rank, whose works have been extensively circulated, whose merits have been keenly relished, and whose name is still unfamiliar in men's mouths. One would suppose that great excellence and real success would inevitably produce a loud reputation. Yet in this particular case such a supposition would be singularly mistaken. ... Mention the name of Miss Austen to a cultivate dreader, and it is probable that the sparkle in his eye will at once flash forth sympathetic admiration, and he will perhaps relate how Scott, Whately, and Macaulay prize this gifted woman, and how the English public has bought her works; but beyond this literary circle we find the name almost entirely unknown; and not simply unknown in the sense of having no acknowledged place among the remarkable writers, but unremembered even in connections with the very works which are themselves remembered. ... "

"That Miss Austen is an artist of high rank, in the most rigorous sense of the word, is an opinion which in the present article we shall endeavour to substantiate. That her novels are very extensively read, is not an opinion, but a demonstrated fact; and with this fact we couple the paradoxical fact, of a fine artist, whose works are widely known and enjoyed, being all but unknown to the English public, and quite unknown abroad. The causes which have kept her name in comparative obscurity all the time that her works have been extensively read, and her reputation every year has been settling itself more firmly in the minds of the better critics, may well be worth an inquiry. It is intelligible how the blaze of Scott should have thrown her into the shade, at first: beside his frescoes her works are but miniatures; exquisite as miniatures, yet incapable of ever filling that space in the public eye which was filled by his massive and masterly pictures. But although it is intelligible why Scott should have eclipsed her, it is not at first so easy to understand why Miss Edgeworth should have done so. Miss Austen, indeed, has taken her revenge with posterity. She will doubtless be read as long as English novels find readers; whereas Miss Edgeworth is already little more than a name, and only finds a public for her children's books. ... Quarterly tells us that "her fame has grown fastest since she died: there was no éclat about her first appearance: the public took time to make up its mind; and she, not having staked her hopes of happiness on success or failure, was content to wait for the decision of her claims. Those claims have been long established beyond a question; but the merit of first recognising them belongs less to the reviewers than to the general readers." There is comfort in this for authors who see the applause of reviewers lavished on works of garish effect. Nothing that is really good can fail, at last, in securing its audience; and it is evident that Miss Austen's work must possess elements of indestructible excellence, since, although never "popular," she survives writers who were very popular; and forty years after her death, gains more recognition than she gained when alive. ... But the fact that her name is not even now a household word proves that her excellence must be of an unobtrusive kind, shunning the glare of popularity, not appealing to temporary tastes and vulgar sympathies, but demanding culture in its admirers. Johnson wittily says of somebody, "Sir, he managed to make himself public without making himself known." Miss Austen has made herself known without making herself public. There is no portrait of her in the shop windows; indeed, no portrait of her at all. But she is cherished in the memories of those whose memory is fame."

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"As one symptom of neglect we have to notice the scantiness of all biographical details about her. Of Miss Burney, who is no longer read, nor much worth reading, we have biography, and to spare. Of Miss Bronte, who, we fear, will soon cease to find readers, there is also ample biography; but of Miss Austen we have little information. In the first volume of the edition published by Mr. Bentley (five charming volumes, to be had for fifteen shillings) there is a meagre notice ... "

Over a century and half later - in fact, since over a half a century ago, and perhaps through the twentieth century for that matter - things have changed, and how! Charlotte Bronte is popular, but mostly amongst younger women, schoolgirl teenagers looking for a read tad more serious than the Mills and Boon etc; while other female contemporaries of Jane Austen are almost unknown, George Eliot is universally respected; and Emily Bronte has shot to much more of an eminence over the other siblings, who began - one suspects - to be looked into, as Emily Bronte began to be known. Jane Austen meanwhile has her works grow and become a monument straddling the line demarcation border between popular and critically regarded high, and one suspects that lack of a universal acknowledgement of her stature is largely due to a vast misogyny, widely prevalent in U.S., which denigrates women authors to a diminutive, disdained category labelled with a word at once known derogatory.

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" ... the charming novel, Northanger Abbey ... did not appear in print until after her death; and this work, which the Quarterly Review pronounces the weakest of the series (a verdict only intelligible to us because in the same breath Persuasion is called the best!), is not only written with unflagging vivacity, but contains two characters no one else could have equalled—Henry Tilney and John Thorpe. ... Between 1811 and 1816 appeared her three chefs-d'oeuvre—Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. The applause these met with, gratified her, of course; but she steadily resisted every attempt to "make a lion of her," and never publicly avowed her authorship, although she spoke freely of it in private. ... "

" ... We may picture her as something like her own sprightly, natural, but by no means perfect Elizabeth Bennett, in Pride and Prejudice, one of the few heroines one would seriously like to marry.

"We have no means of ascertaining how many copies of these exquisite pictures of English life have been circulated, but we know that the number is very large. Twice or thrice have the railway editions been out of print; and Mr. Bentley's edition is stereotyped. This success implies a hold on the public, all the more certainly because the popularity is "not loud but deep." We have re-read them all four times; or rather, to speak more accurately, they have been read aloud to us, one after the other; and when it is considered what a severe test that is, how the reading aloud permits no skipping, no evasion of weariness, but brings both merits and defects into stronger relief by forcing the mind to dwell on them, there is surely something significant of genuine excellence when both reader and listener finish their fourth reading with increase of admiration. The test of reading aloud applied to Jane Eyre, which had only been read once before, very considerably modified our opinion of that remarkable work; and, to confess the truth, modified it so far that we feel as if we should never open the book again. The same test applied to such an old favourite as Tom Jones, was also much more damaging than we should have anticipated—bringing the defects and shortcomings of that much overrated work into very distinct prominence, and lessening our pleasure in its effective, but, on the whole, coarse painting. ... This is at any rate our individual judgment, which the reader is at liberty to modify as he pleases. In the course of the fifteen years which have elapsed since we first read Emma, and Mansfield Park, we have outlived many admirations, but have only learned to admire Miss Austen more; and as we are perfectly aware of why we so much admire her, we may endeavour to communicate these reasons to the reader."

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"If, as probably few will dispute, the art of the novelist be the representation of human life by means of a story; and if the truest representation, effected by the least expenditure of means, constitutes the highest claim of art, then we say that Miss Austen has carried the art to a point of excellence surpassing that reached by any of her rivals. Observe we say "the art;" we do not say that she equals many of them in the interest excited by the art; that is a separate question. It is probable, nay certain, that the interest excited by the Antigone is very inferior to that excited by Black-eyed Susan. It is probably that Uncle Tom and Dred surpassed in interest the Antiquary or Ivanhoe. It is probable that Jane Eyre produced a far greater excitement than the Vicar of Wakefield. But the critic justly disregards these fervid elements of immediate success, and fixes his attention mainly on the art which is of eternal substance. Miss Austen has nothing fervid in her works. She is not capable of producing a profound agitation in the mind. In many respects this is a limitation of her powers, a deduction from her claims. But while other writers have had more power over the emotions, more vivid imaginations, deeper sensibilities, deeper insight, and more of what is properly called invention, no novelist has approached her in what we may style the "economy of art," by which is meant the easy adaptation of means to ends, with no aid from extraneous or superfluous elements. Indeed, paradoxical as the juxtaposition of the names may perhaps appear to those who have not reflected much on this subject, we venture to say that the only names we can place above Miss Austen, in respect of this economy of art, are Sophocles and Molière (in Les Misanthrope). And if anyone will examine the terms of the definition, he will perceive that almost all defects in works of art arise from neglect of this economy. When the end is the representation of human nature in its familiar aspects, moving amid every-day scenes, the means must likewise be furnished from every-day life: romance and improbabilities must be banished as rigorously as the grotesque exaggeration of peculiar characteristics, or the representation of abstract types. it is easy for an artist to choose a subject from everyday life, but it is not easy for him so to represent the characters and their actions that they shall be at once lifelike and interesting; accordingly, whenever ordinary people are introduced, they are either made to speak a language never spoken out of books, and to pursue conduct never observed in life; or else they are intolerably wearisome. But Miss Austen is like Shakespeare: she makes her very noodles inexhaustibly amusing, yet accurately real. We never tire of her characters. They become equal to actual experiences. They live with us, and form perpetual topics of comment. ... The heroines—at least Elizabeth, Emma, and Catherine Morland—are truly lovable, flesh-and-blood young women; and the good people are all really good, without being goody. Her reverend critic in the Quarterly says, "She herself compares her productions to a little bit of ivory, two inches wide, worked upon with a brush so fine that little effect is produced with much labour. It is so: her portraits are perfect likenesses, admirably finished, many of them gems; but it is all miniature painting; and having satisfied herself with being inimitable in one line, she never essayed canvass and oils; never tried her hand at a majestic daub." ... She belongs to the great dramatists; but her dramas are of homely, common quality. It is obvious that the nature of the thing represented will determine degrees in art. Raphael will always rank higher than Teniers; Sophocles and Shakespeare will never be lowered to the rank of Lope de Vega and Scribe. It is a greater effort of genius to produce a fine epic than a fine pastoral; a great drama than a perfect lyric. There is far greater stain on the intellectual effort to create a Brutus or an Othello, than to create a Vicar of Wakefield or a Squire Western. The higher the aims, the greater is the strain, and the nobler is success.

"These, it may be said, are truism; and so they are. Yet they need restatement from time to time, because men constantly forget that the dignity of a high aim cannot shed lustre on an imperfect execution, though to some extent it may lessen the contempt which follows upon failure. It is only success which can claim applause. Any fool can select a great subject; and in general it is the tendency of fools to choose subjects which the strong feel to be too great. If a man can leap a five-barred gate, we applaud his agility; but if he attempt it, without a chance of success, the mud receives him, and we applaud the mud. This is too often forgotten by critics and artists, in their grandiloquence about "high art." No art can be high that is not good. A grand subject ceases to be grand when its treatment is feeble. It is a great mistake, as has been wittily said, "to fancy yourself a great painter because you paint with a big brush;" and there are unhappily too many big brushes in the hands of incompetence. ... It is twenty times more difficult to write a fine tragedy than a fine lyric; but it is more difficult to write a perfect lyric than a tolerable tragedy; and there was as much sense as sarcasm in Beranger's reply when the tragic poet Viennet visited him in prison, and suggested that of course there would be a volume of songs as the product of this leisure. "Do you suppose," said Beranger, "that chansons are written as easily as tragedies?"

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The following brings a smile towards end -

" ... The secret is, Miss Austen was a thorough mistress in the knowledge of human character; how it is acted upon by education and circumstance, and how, when once formed, it shows itself through every hour of every day, and in every speech of every person. ... in Miss Austen's hands we see into their hearts and hopes, their motives, their struggles within themselves; and a sympathy is induced which, if extended to daily life and the world at large, would make the reader a more amiable person; and we must think it that reader's own fault who does not close her pages with more charity in his heart towards unpretending, if prosing worth; with a higher estimation of simple kindness and sincere good-will; with a quickened sense of the duty of bearing and forbearing in domestic intercourse, and of the pleasure of adding to the little comforts even of persons who are neither wits nor beauties." It is worth remembering that this is the deliberate judgment of the present Archbishop of Dublin, and not a careless verdict dropping from the pen of a facile reviewer. There are two points in it to which especial attention may be given: first, the indication of Miss Austen's power of representing life; and, secondly, the indication of the effect which her sympathy with ordinary life produces. ... introducing a striking passage from one of the works of Mr. George Eliot, a writer who seems to us inferior to Miss Austen in the art of telling a story, and generally in what we have called the "economy of art;" but equal in truthfulness, dramatic ventriloquism, and humour, and greatly superior in culture, in reach of mind, and depth of emotional sensibility. ... "

Obviously Mr Lewes is far from a misogynist- he's completely unaware of identity of George Eliot, and assuming it's a male, despite being aware no doubt, that Charlotte Bronte wrote and published under a male name, Currer Bell, he is judging Jane Austen superior to what he unquestionably assumes is a male author, George Eliot- which a misogynist insect such as Firkins would not dream of doing.

"But the real secret of Miss Austen's success lies in her having the exquisite and rare gift of dramatic creation of character. Scott says of her, "She had a talent for describing the involvements, and feelings, and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any one now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!"[96] Generously said; but high as the praise is, it is as much below the real excellence of Miss Austen, as the "big bow-wow strain" is below the incomparable power of the Waverley Novels. Scott felt, but did not define, the excellence of Miss Austen. The very word "describing" is altogether misplaced and misleading. She seldom describes anything, and is not felicitous when she attempts it. But instead of description, the common and easy resource of novelists, she has the rare and difficult art of dramatic presentation: instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves. In this she has never perhaps been surpassed, not even by Shakespeare himself. If ever living beings can be said to have moved across the page of fiction, as they lived, speaking as they spoke, and feeling as they felt, they do so in Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Mansfield Park. ... "

" ... If the reader fails to perceive the extraordinary merit of Miss Austen's representation of character, let him try himself to paint a portrait which shall be at once many-sided and interesting, without employing any but the commonest colours, without calling in the aid of eccentricity, exaggeration, or literary "effects;" or let him carefully compare the writings of Miss Austen with those of any other novelist, from Fielding to Thackeray.

"It is probably this same dramatic instinct which makes the construction of her stories so admirable. And by construction, we mean the art which, selecting what is useful and rejecting what is superfluous, renders our interest unflagging, because one chapter evolves the next, one character is necessary to the elucidation of another. In what is commonly called "plot" she does not excel. Her invention is wholly in character and motive, not in situation. Her materials are of the commonest every-day occurrence. Neither the emotions of tragedy, nor the exaggerations of farce, seem to have the slightest attraction for her. The reader's pulse never throbs, his curiosity is never intense; but his interest never wanes for a moment. The action begins; the people speak, feel, and act; everything that is said, felt, or done tends towards the entanglement or disentanglement of the plot; and we are almost made actors as well as spectators of the little drama. One of the most difficult things in dramatic writing is so to construct the story that every scene shall advance the denouement by easy evolution, yet at the same time give scope to the full exhibition of the characters. In dramas, as in novels, we almost always see that the action stands still while the characters are being exhibited, and the characters are in abeyance while the action is being unfolded. ... "

"So entirely dramatic, and so little descriptive, is the genius of Miss Austen, that she seems to rely upon what her people say and do for the whole effect they are to produce on our imaginations. She no more thinks of describing the physical appearance of her people than the dramatist does who knows that his persons are to be represented by living actors. ... It is impossible that Mr. Collins should not have been endowed by nature with an appearance in some way heralding the delicious folly of the inward man. Yet all we hear of this fatuous curate is, that "he was a tall, heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty. His air was grave and stately, and his manners were very formal." Balzac or Dickens would not have been content without making the reader see this Mr. Collins. Miss Austen is content to make us know him, even to the very intricacies of his inward man. It is not stated whether she was short-sighted, but the absence of all sense of the outward world—either scenery or personal appearance—is more remarkable in her than in any writer we remember.

"We are touching here on one of her defects which help to an explanation of her limited popularity, especially when coupled with her deficiencies in poetry and passion. She has little or no sympathy with what is picturesque and passionate. This prevents her from painting what the popular eye can see, and the popular heart can feel. The struggles the ambitions, the errors, and the sins of energetic life are left untouched by her; and these form the subjects most stirring to the general sympathy. ... Passion and adventure are the sources of certain success with the mass of mankind. The passion may be coarsely felt, the romance may be ridiculous, but there will always be found a large majority whose sympathies will be awakened by even the coarsest daubs. Emotion is in its nature sympathetic and uncritical; a spark will ignite it. Types of villainy never seen or heard of out of books, or off the stage, types of heroism and virtue not less hyperbolical, are eagerly welcomed and believed in by a public which would pass over without notice the subtlest creations of genius, and which would even resent the more truthful painting as disturbing its emotional enjoyment of hating the bad, and loving the good. The nicer art which mingles goodness with villany, and weakness with virtue, as in life they are always mingled, causes positive distress to young and uncultivated minds. The mass of men never ask whether a character is true, or the events probable; it is enough for them that they are moved; and to move them strongly, black must be very black, and white without a shade. ... "

" ... Miss Austen is such a novelist. Her subjects have little intrinsic interest; it is only in their treatment that they become attractive; but treatment and art are not likely to captivate any except critical and refined tastes. Every reader will be amused by her pictures, because their very truth carries them home to ordinary experience and sympathy; but this amusement is of a tepid nature, and the effect is quickly forgotten. Partridge expressed the general sentiment of the public when he spoke slightingly of Garrick's "Hamlet," because Garrick did just what he, Partridge, would have done in presence of a ghost; whereas the actor who performed the king, powerfully impressed him by sonorous elocution and emphatic gesticulation: that was acting, and required art; the other was natural, and not worth alluding to.

"The absence of breadth, picturesqueness, and passion, will also limit the appreciating audience of Miss Austen to the small circle of cultivated minds; and even those minds are not always capable of greatly relishing her works."

Lewes, while far from anywhere near misogyny, still obliterated women, as most males do from what they consider their world - and forgets that women, too, read. Whats more, most women are concerned about questions of love, marriage, normal life, for not only themselves but for their daughters, granddaughters, sisters, nieces, and yes, sons and nephews too. This is the region of Jane Austen's writing, keeping out what does not concern most people, especially most women. Did anyone ever challenge anyone about an anonymous survey regarding who appreciated which works of Shakespeare's? It's possible on internet, and if done properly, neither Hamlet nor Othello will be high, but Romeo and Juliet will. Jane Austen might just do better, with matters of concern for women treted within framework of their normal life. The only way she could have done better was if she'd dealt satisfactorily with the question of dealing with abusive husband, or elders of a young girl. People might not realise it, but this is the only point where Charlotte Bronte started ahead in Jane Eyre - a helpless young girl dealing with an abusive elder in control.

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Lewes gives views of Charlotte Bronte and Walter Scott about Jane Austen's writing, which agree on her work being likened to pleasant cottages with little flower gardens, lacking romance, grandeur or serious problems. This is not true, and obviously neither could put their self in place of even Elizabeth Bennet, much less Elinore Dashwood or Fanny Price. Each of these is a character who has either lost a love, or refused at least one suitor who, if accepted, could secure her life. And this refusal has been on ethical, moral grounds, not necessarily those of actual dislike or repugnance. They have, moreover, subsequently faced desolation, looking forth to an empty life, of not only limited means or uncertain future, but a possibility of dire circumstances. If this does not border on difficulty, much less horror or tragedy, the reader is a comfortably situated person who never could imagine himself or herself in those circumstances. It isn't a pleasant cottage with a little flower garden, at all. One can only object to the word 'indifferent', when Lewes says -

"Miss Austen has generally but an indifferent story to tell, but her art of telling it is incomparable. Her characters, never ideal, are not of an eminently attractive order; but her dramatic ventriloquism and power of presentation is little less than marvellous. Macaulay declares his opinion that in this respect she is second only to Shakespeare. "Among the writers," he says, "who, in the point we have noticed, have approached nearest the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace—all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings…. And all this is done by touches so delicate that they elude analysis, that they defy powers of description, and that we only know them to exist by the general effect to which they have contributed.""

None of the stories by Jane Austen are indifferent - and in fact, they have an appeal far more universal beyond Shakespeare, whose one or two works are as timeless.

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"We have thus endeavoured to characterise, in general terms, the qualities which her works display. It is less easy to speak with sufficient distinctness of the particular works, since, unless our readers have these vividly present to memory (in which case our remarks would be superfluous), we cannot hope to be perfectly intelligible; no adequate idea of them can be given by a review of one ... Her characters are so gradually unfolded, their individuality reveals itself so naturally and easily in the course of what they say and do, that we learn to know them as if we had lived with them, but cannot by any single speech or act make them known to others. Aunt Norris, for instance, in Mansfield Park, is a character profoundly and variously delineated; yet there is no scene in which she exhibits herself to those who have not the pleasurable disgust of her acquaintance; while to those who have, there is no scene in which she does not exhibit herself. Mr. Collins, making an offer to Elizabeth Bennet, formally stating the reasons which induced him to marry, and the prudential motives which have induced him to select her, and then adding, "Nothing now remains for me but to assure you, in the most animated language, of the violence of my affection. To fortune I am perfectly indifferent, and shall make no demand of that nature on your father, since I am well aware that it could not be complied with; and that one thousand pounds in the four-per-cents, which will not be yours till after your mother's decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to. On that head, therefore, I shall be uniformly silent; and you may assure yourself that no ungenerous reproach shall ever pass my lips when we are married;" and after her refusal, persisting in accepting this refusal as only what is usual with young ladies, who reject the addresses of the man they secretly mean to accept, "I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long;"—this scene, ludicrous as it is throughout, receives its exquisite flavour from what has gone before. We feel morally persuaded that so Mr. Collins would speak and act. The man who, on taking leave of his host, formally assures him that he will not fail to send a "letter of thanks" on his return, and does send it, is just the man to have made this declaration. ... "

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September 12, 2021 - September 13, 2021.

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EXCERPT FROM

Criticism and Fiction

by William Dean Howells (1891)

(Chapter XV)

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" ... WHICH brings us again, after this long way about, to the divine Jane and her novels, and that troublesome question about them. She was great and they were beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it today. Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness. Because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the English novelist, and alone worthy to be matched with the great Scandinavian and Slavic and Latin artists. It is not a question of intellect, or not wholly that. The English have mind enough; but they have not taste enough; or, rather, their taste has been perverted by their false criticism, which is based upon personal preference, and not upon principle; which instructs a man to think that what he likes is good, instead of teaching him first to distinguish what is good before he likes it. The art of fiction, as Jane Austen knew it, declined from her through Scott, and Bulwer, and Dickens, and Charlotte Brontë, and Thackeray, and even George Eliot, because the mania of romanticism had seized upon all Europe, and these great writers could not escape the taint of their time; but it has shown few signs of recovery in England, because English criticism, in the presence of the continental masterpieces, has continued provincial and special and personal, and has expressed a love and a hate which had to do with the quality of the artist rather than the character of his work. ... The only observer of English middle-class life since Jane Austen worthy to be named with her was not George Eliot, who was first ethical and then artistic, who transcended her in everything but the form and method most essential to art, and there fell hopelessly below her. It was Anthony Trollope who was most like her in simple honesty and instinctive truth, as unphilosophised as the light of common day; but he was so warped from a wholesome ideal as to wish at times to be like the caricaturist Thackeray, and to stand about in his scene, talking it over with his hands in his pockets, interrupting the action, and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art resides. Mainly, his instinct was too much for his ideal, and with a low view of life in its civic relations and a thoroughly bourgeois soul, he yet produced works whose beauty is surpassed only by the effect of a more poetic writer in the novels of Thomas Hardy. ... "

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September 13, 2021 - September 13, 2021.

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THE PERFECTION OF THE NOVEL

by William Edward Simonds (1894)

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"Under the influence of the "Mysteries of Udolpho" written by Mrs. Radcliffe in 1794 —and very neatly satirised by Jane Austen in "Northanger Abbey" not long after —Matthew Gregory Lewis wrote "The Monk." Lewis was wise enough to discard the childish bugaboos of Otranto, and to finally explain his mysteries, or at least suggest an accounting therefor in his closing chapter. "The Monk" (1796) was written before its author had attained the age of twenty; and so powerful was the impression made by it that its writer has been known as "Monk" Lewis from that day to this. Lewis was full of the German influence of his time...."

"By far the most clever novelist of her day was Jane Austen (1775-1817). ... Quietly as she lived she wrote: her intimate friends were hardly aware of her occupation or her power. And it is a very quiet phase of life that Jane Austen has described, although her art is such that the most commonplace scenes appear eventful and the commonest characters important. No one since Fielding and Sterne had displayed such power as was hers in the realistic touches which exhibit character; but the material which supplied Miss Austen with her creations was widely different from that which furnished the earlier novelists with theirs. The most sensational occurrence in her pages is an elopement which ends with a due respect for the proprieties. The moral purpose is strong in Jane Austen's work. "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), "Sense and Sensibility" (1811), are her two most ambitious novels, and the titles are suggestive of the lessons they inculcate. The story is always told straightforwardly, and rarely drags; the author possesses a modest knowledge of the world, and allows a frequent dash of satire to give some piquancy to her descriptions. "Northanger Abbey" (1818) is written quite in the spirit of banter, and the humorous misadventures of the romantically inclined young heroine are shafts capitally aimed against the tasteless romances of the "Udolpho" type. Miss Austen was a most minute observer: microscopic is the word to be used of her method of observation and in treatment. With painstaking accuracy each detail of every process is described. Modest she was in all things, —yes, but not mediocre. Sir Walter paid her a remarkable compliment: "That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going; but the characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me." So far as this applies to Jane Austen, Scott's words are eminently true. ... These stories were published anonymously, and although the secret of their authorship leaked out, they were never avowed by Miss Austen as her work. Their real merit was not generally appreciated until after the early death of their author, but the fame which came so tardily shows no sign of waning. Next to Scott, there is no author of that time whose works, so unlike those of the great romanticist, are so generally familiar or read with so much real appreciation today as quite, homely, wholesome Jane Austen."

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September 13, 2021 - September 13, 2021.

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FROM FIELDING TO JANE AUSTEN by

Williams James Dawson (1905)

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" ... Jane Austen, born in 1775, at Steventon, is one of the true immortals of English literature, yet she found no easy road to fame. Few novelists have written three great novels without the prospect of publishing one of them, yet this was Jane Austen's fate. And when we remember that all the great names we have already mentioned are the names of persons moving more or less in a large world, cheered by the praise or stimulated by the opposition of their contemporaries, and drawing their knowledge of life from ample sources, perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of Jane Austen's life is its singular isolation."

"Her highest claim as an artist is that she inaugurated the novel of still life.

"In a day when people wept over the mock pathos of Sterne, and were thrilled with the sensationalism of Mrs. Radcliffe, it needed an unusual degree of courage, of resolute self-poise, and of detachment of mind to accomplish this task, and for the development of these qualities solitude was necessary. And, to the discerning, there is genuine dignity and pathos in the picture of this quiet, cheerful, clear-eyed woman, far away from the great interests of life, sitting down to write books which no publisher was to venture on for years, and yet so absolutely assured of the rightness of her method, and so full of the quiet enjoyment of her own work, that her patience is never wearied, her temper never soured, her brightness never dulled. She wrought for pure love of her work, and without thinking much about it. She wrote at her little desk by the sunny window, carefully covering up her papers when a stranger entered, and breathing no word to anyone outside the family circle of the nature of her pursuits. Sometimes she wrote amid the chatter of conversation, and found it no detriment. She wrote on, unconscious of her own genius, and content that no one should recognise her as an unusual person. Before her, as she sat at her desk, all the little world she knew lived and moved, and it was all the world she wanted. She was content to love and be loved, and did not ask for praise. ... "

" ....there can be no doubt of the greatness of her work, though it is a kind of work too true and delicate ever to be appreciated at its real worth by minds destitute of critical discrimination."

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September 13, 2021 - September 13, 2021.

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JANE AUSTEN, AND THE NOVEL OF SOCIAL COMEDY

by Williams James Dawson (1905)

Chapter IV of Makers of English Fiction

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"It has often been said that an original writer has to create the taste by which he is appreciated; it may be remembered also that the original writer often unconsciously discerns an altered or a new taste in the public before the public itself is quite aware of the change ... "

" ... She brought to her task of social comedy a singular combination of rare gifts – a wit and satire of wonderful delicacy, a mind of great penetration, a style absolutely pellucid and effortless. No novelist has ever been more thoroughly an artist both in her attitude towards her own work and in her respect for her own limitations. She is so impersonal in her attitude that one may seek in vain for any trace of her own opinions or thoughts in her writings. Her respect for her own limitations is equally remarkable. "I must keep to my own style," she says, "and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other." Within her own limits she comes as near perfection as any human genius can, and those who object to the material and scale of her art should recollect that a dewdrop may be as perfect a creation as a star, a grass-blade may be fashioned with as high a skill as the most wonderful of tropic flowers.

"In order justly to appreciate Jane Austen, the first duty of the reader is, then, quite obvious; it is to respect the limitations of her art, as she herself did. It is foolish to expect from her what she does not profess to give, such as romance, or high-flown sentiment, or the tragedy of great passions. She painted the world she knew; her claim is that she not only painted it with fidelity, but with sympathy; with a lively sense of its blemishes, and with an ever-present satire, no doubt; but also with a true insight into its redeeming pieties and virtues. It is not her fault that romance and sentiment and large passions are not found in her pages; they were not found in the world she knew.

"Like the Brontës, Jane Austen was born and bred in an English parsonage, and lived in a by-road far from the main roads of life. But the Brontes had a far better opportunity than Jane Austen. They at least lived among a people in whom the primitive passions were strong and very imperfectly suppressed. The country which lay at the back of Haworth was as wild as the people, and had a primeval beauty and savageness of its own. One could conceive of great dramas, full of intense love and passion and revenge, being enacted on such a stage; there is a suggestion of the Titanic in the very scenery. But Jane Austen was born into a world of unredeemed dullness. Everything around her was prim and trim and proper. Instead of thunder-scarred hills there are leafy parks and smooth lawns. The people who move across these strictly regulated Edens have the unconscious self-poise of very proper persons; they love with discretion and sobriety ... "

"Yet it was from this material that Jane Austen has contrived to extract stories which have survived for a century, and seem likely to endure to quite unprophesied generations. The means by which this success has been achieved are quite clear to anyone who will study her works with even casual attention. She had the clearest eyes that ever detected the foibles of human character. The very limitation of her range of vision explains its intensity. She accurately described her method when she spoke of herself as a miniature painter. Broad and tumultuous effects she not merely cannot achieve —she dislikes them. But she can lay touch upon touch with an infinite patience and fineness, until the finished picture is as near perfection as one can well conceive. It may perhaps be but miniature painting —a work of art wrought upon three inches of ivory; nevertheless, to write "Pride and Prejudice" demands as fine a genius as the production of "Ivanhoe" or "Kenilworth." This no one knew better than Sir Walter Scott, who, after reading "Pride and Prejudice" for the third time, says: "The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied me." It is this exquisite touch which Jane Austen possesses, and in a degree that is unrivalled. She has successfully contrived the apotheosis of the commonplace, and clothed dullness with distinction.

"In Jane Austen it is the very naturalness of the picture which makes it seem uninteresting. Without perhaps saying it, or even analysing our thoughts so far as to express it, we all of us favour a little exaggeration in art. We do not object to emphasis; on the contrary, it attracts us. A bit of clear blue sky and greyish-blue down is not enough for us; its simplicity seems to us commonplace, and its truth foolish. And in the same way a book that is no more nor less than an exact reflection of life, which does not attempt to group people with an eye to stage-effect, or to put speeches into their mouths which invite applause, repels us by its very fidelity. Beyond doubt many readers will be similarly affected by Jane Austen. But upon reflection they will begin to discover how wonderful a gift this is, which can gaze on life with so unembarrassed an eye and report its vision with so perfect an exactitude. After a while the bit of blue sky and grey down charm us. The quiet and simple tones of colour soothe and delight us.

"The genius of Jane Austen lies in this perfect and even severe simplicity. Her characters evolve themselves without any aid of dramatic episodes. Her plot is as natural and inevitable as a problem in mathematics. Everything is fitted together with the most delicate contrivance, with the art that effectually conceals art. From first to last the atmosphere is exquisitely lucid, the style distinct and firm, the figures, in spite of the old-fashioned stiffness of their phrase and gait, so vital that they are more real to us than many of the people we have dined with. We feel, not that we have read a book, but that we have been magically transported into the eighteenth century, and have breathed its air and lived its life.

"Like all great artists, Jane Austen is thus in a sense an historian as well as an artist. ... It is often deplored that professional historians, who are capable enough of describing the pageantries of a court, the contests of politicians, the sumptuous lives of the rich, or even the miserable conditions of life among the disinherited and the criminal, appear incapable of producing any accurate picture of the average kind of life lived by those distinguished by neither great wealth nor great poverty, by neither uncommon learning nor uncommon ignorance. Jane Austen gives us incidentally just the sort of details about the lives of average people which the historian omits and the sociologist demands. We can leave to the historian the Napoleonic drama which was played out amid the terror and applause of Europe in the closing years of the eighteenth century. If there is no echo of its trampling hosts in the pages of Jane Austen, there is something equally valuable to us who survey the whole period with infinite curiosity there is a picture of England itself, the England of the dull average, from whose stubborn pride was evolved the force that brought the drama to a close. Yet it is an England that seems so far away as to appear almost unrecognisable. The heroines of Jane Austen's pages travel by post-chaise, think fifty miles a prodigious journey, and an excursion to Derbyshire a serious adventure. Gracechurch Street is a locality where a wealthy merchant may fitly reside; but the proud Darcy, who has an estate in Derbyshire, would never think of penetrating so plebeian a neighbourhood. Clergymen speak with bated breath and whispering humbleness of their patrons, and livings are left by will to family favourites. People have a way of talking like copybooks; and the proprieties, especially in relation to women, are defined and strict. It is looked upon as a monstrous thing that Elizabeth Bennet should walk three miles on a country road, and her critics exclaim:

""To walk three miles, or whatever it is, above her ankles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! What could she mean by it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country-town indifference to decorum. She really looked almost wild!""

"The comparison between Jane Austen and Shakespeare, suggested by both Macaulay and Mr. Goldwin Smith, is ingenious, and, within the limits drawn by these great critics, just; but Thackeray affords us a closer comparison. The spirit of Jane Austen is entirely the spirit of Thackeray.

"There is the same criticism of life; the hatred of shams, and the quick irony that pierces and exposes them; the delightful turns of expression, the caustic word which is not readily forgotten, and the humour, half genial and half sardonic, by which the facts of life are illumined. The only difference is that, while Thackeray was really angry with snobs, Jane Austen is too conscious of their absurdities to be irritated over them. Thackeray can be very bitter; but Jane Austen gives her most caustic criticisms a flavour of humour which robs them of ill-nature. When it becomes a question of pathos, Thackeray out-distances Jane Austen completely; but probably that is due simply to the fact that in 1850 writers did not deem it necessary to disguise their tenderer feelings, and in 1811 they did.

"A woman who carefully concealed the fact that she was a writer, and wished only to be loved and trusted for her womanliness, would not be likely to uncover the depths of her heart even in books. Jane Austen was trained in the tradition that regarded any display of deep feeling as unwomanly, and the real reticence and modesty of her nature made the expression of pathos as difficult as it was undesirable. But on her humour she put no restraint save that of kindliness, and keen as is her irony it is impossible to accuse her of cynicism. In this also she resembles Thackeray, who concealed beneath the assumed savageness of the satirist the softest and most human of hearts."

" ... When she was very ill, and near death, she would not use the sofa —sofas in those days were rare —because she was afraid if she did so her mother might scruple to use it. She made shift with a couple of chairs, and persuaded her mother that they were more comfortable. It is a little touch, but a tender and pathetic one) and it shows the woman. ... Today every summer brings numerous pilgrims to her grave, and her latest and most brilliant critic has said, "On her was bestowed, though in a humble form, the gift which has been bestowed on Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Scott, and a few others —the gift of creative power."

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September 13, 2021 - September 14, 2021.

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MISS AUSTEN

from the New Monthly Magazine (1852)

Unsigned

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The author, unknown since the article is unsigned, begins with a highly misogynistic statement-

"Given a subject of composition like the novel, it is reasonable to expect a goodly proportion of what Monkbarns called "womankind" among the compositors. The subject is at active to those tastes, and within the scope of those faculties, which are, generally speaking, characteristic of the fairer sex. Perhaps, indeed—and some critics would substitute" unquestionably" for "perhaps"—none but a man, of first-rate powers withal, can produce a first-rate novel; and, if so, it may be alleged that a woman of corresponding genius (quâ woman) can only produce one of a second-rate order. ... "

It's unclear if that's the author's own opinion as well or whether it's acceptance of a general assumption, based on same facts that produced slave trade - namely, force ruled. But the author goes on :-

" ... However that may be—and leaving the definition of what is first-rate and what second-rate to critics of a subtler vein and weightier calibre than we shall ever attain to—proofs there are, enough and to spare, in the literature of our land, that clever women can write, and have written, very clever novels; that this is a department where they feel and show themselves at home; that, in the symmetry of a complicated plot, the elaboration of varied character, and the filling-in of artistic touches and imaginative details, they can design and accomplish works which go down to posterity not very far behind those of certain titanic lords of creation. ... "

Author goes on to give details of various women writers of the era in English literature, from beginning of novels as art form to eighteenth century, who were not only popular and successful, much lauded, but also critically worthy of appreciation.

" ... As it was reasonable to predicate an abundance of female novelists, so is it evident, by every circulating library and every advertising journal, that such abundance exists. Almost the earliest pieces of prose fictions in our language are from the pen of a woman—not the most exemplary of her sex—Mistress Aphra Beha, the "Astraea" of Charles the Second's days. After the novel, more properly so called, had acquired a local habitation and a name amongst us, by the performances of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, we find, during the past century, an imposing array of "womankind" successfully cultivating these "pastures new." Clara Reeve wrote several tales of the "Otranto" type, all marked, in the judgment of Sir Walter Scott, by excellent good sense, pure morality, and a competent command of those qualities which constitute a good romance. If the Minerva Press deluged the town with its springtide of fluent nonsense, much of it the billowy froth of feminine as well as effeminate "Persons of Quality," there soon uprose to stem the current a succession of ladies who could cope better with its surges than Mrs. Partington with those of the Atlantic. Mrs. Radcliffe is by no means the beau-ideal of a novelist; yet even her atrocities were an improvement upon, and instrumentally fatal to, the squeamish woes of that maudlin clique. Then, too, came Charlotte Smith, of "Old Manor House" celebrity; and little Fanny Burney, with her Evelinas and Cecilias and Camillas; and the sisters Lee, with their "Canterbury Tales;" and the sisters Porter, of whom Anna Maria alone published half a century of volumes; and Mrs. Brunton, the still popular authoress of "Self-Control;" and Miss Edgeworth, whose gift it was to "dispense common sense to her readers, and to bring them within the precincts of real life and natural feeling." As we approach more closely to our own times, the name of the fair company becomes legion. Mrs. Shelley appears:

"And Shelley, four-famed—for her parents, her lord,

"And the poor, lone, impossible monster abhorred—

""Frankenstein," to wit—a romance classed by Moore with those original conceptions that take hold of the public mind at once and forever. ... "

And many more -

" ... Miss Ferrier is a foremost reaper of what Scott called the large harvest of Scottish characters and fiction, a harvest in which recent labourers (witness "Mrs. Margaret Maitland," etc.) have found new sheaves for their sickle. Lady Morgan presents us with a "Wild Irish Girl" and "Florence Macarthy." Mrs. Trollope is seen in the plethora of exhaustless authorship, surpassed therein only by Mrs. Gore, with her Heaps of "Polite Conversation," so true

"That one cannot but wish the three volumes were two;

"But not when she dwells upon daughters or mothers—;

"Oh, then the three make us quite long for three others!

"And who will not be ready to name Mary Russell Mitford, one of England's truest autochthonai? And Mrs. S.C. Hall, that kindly and wise-hearted limner of the lights and shadows of Irish life? And Mrs. Bray, of Tavistock, the accomplished delineator of Devonshire characters and submissions? and Lady Blessington, whose writings often beam, like her face in the golden age of Gore House, (before the entrée of Soyer and the Symposium,) with "enjoyment, and judgment, and wit, and good-nature?" and Mrs. Marsh, the powerful as well as industrious authoress of many an impressive fiction? and Currer Bell, one of the few who have lately excited a real "sensation?" and Mrs. Crowe, with her melodramatic points and supernatural adjuncts, some of which make even utilitarians and materialists look transcendental for the nonce? And Mrs. Gaskill, whose "mission" is as benevolent and practical as her manner is clear and forcible? The catalogue might be lengthened out with many other well-known titles, such as Landon, Martineau, Hoffland, Pardoe, Bowles, Pickering, Norton, Howitt, Johnstone, Ellis, Kavanagh, etc., etc."

This was the background on which Jane Austen grew up, wrote, and published, and was lauded by more than one prominent intellectual and author as comparable to Shakespeare in her excellence and quality of her writing.

"In her own line of things, Jane Austen is surpassed, perhaps equalled by none of this pleasant and numerous family. She is perfect mistress of all she touches, and certainly nil tetigit quod non ornavit—if not with the embellishments of idealism and romance, at least with the fresh strokes of nature. She fascinates you with common-place people. She effectually interests you in the "small-beer chronicles" of every-day household life. ... "

"You have actually met all her heroes and heroines before—not in novels, but in most unromantic and prosaic circumstances; you have talked with them, and never seen anything in them—anything, at least, worthy of three volumes, at half-a-guinea a volume. How could such folks find their way into a printed book? That is a marvel, a paradox, a practical solecism. But a greater marvel remains behind, and that is, how comes at that such folks, having got into the book, make it so interesting? ... We do not mean that we, or you, reader, or even that professed and successful novelists now living, could produce the same result with the same means, or elicit from the given terms an equivalent remainder. Herein, on the contrary, lies the unique power of Jane Austen, that where everyone else is nearly sure of failing, she invariably and unequivocally triumphs. What, in other hands, would be a flat, insipid, intolerable piece of impertinent dullness, becomes, at her bidding, a sprightly, versatile, never-flagging chapter of realities. She knows how far to go in describing a character, and where to stop, never allowing that character to soar into romance or to sink into mere twaddle. She is a thorough artist in the management of nature. Her sketches from nature are not profusely huddled together in crude and ill-assorted heaps—the indiscriminate riches of a crowded portfolio, into which genius has recklessly tossed its manifold essays, all clever, but not all in place; but they are selected and arranged with the practised skill of a disciplined judgment, and challenge the scrutiny of tasteful students of design."

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" ... Both Sir Walter Scott and Archbishop Whately—the one in 1815, the other in 1821—saw and proclaimed her distinguished merits in the pages of the "Quarterly Review." Sir Walter observes, that, keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and originality that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners, and sentiments greatly above our own. She "confines herself chiefly to the middling classes of society. Her most distinguished characters do not rise greatly above well-bred country gentlemen and ladies; and those which are sketched with most originality and precision belong to a class rather below that standard. The narrative of all her novels is composed of such common occurrences as may have fallen under the observation of most folks, and her dramatis personae conduct themselves upon the motives and principles which the readers may recognise as ruling their own and that of most of their acquaintances." So wrote the unknown novelist who had just given to the world "Waverley" and "Guy Mannering." Eleven years of personal and unparalleled triumph found Sir Walter confirmed in his admiration of Jane Austen; for, in 1826—that is, after he had composed "Rob Roy," and the "Tales of my Landlord," and "Ivanhoe," and " Quentin Durward," and while he was busy at "Woodstock"—we find the following characteristic entry in his diary, or "gurnal," as he loved to style it: "Read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely-written novel of 'Pride and Prejudice.' That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, and feelings, and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!" An Edinburgh reviewer justly remarks, that ordinary readers have been apt to judge of her as Partridge judged of Garrick's acting. He could not see the merit of a man behaving on the stage as anybody might be expected to behave under similar circumstances in real life. He infinitely preferred the "robustious, periwig-pated fellow," who flourished his arms like a windmill, and ranted with the voice of three. Even thus is Miss Austen too natural for superficial readers. "It seems to them as if there can be very little merit in making characters talk and act so exactly like the people whom they see around them every day. They do not consider that the highest triumph of art consists in its concealment; and here the art is so little perceptible that they believe there is none." Meanwhile, readers of more refined taste and critical acumen feel something like dissatisfaction with almost every other domestic novelist, after they have once appreciated Miss Austen. After her unaffected good-sense, her shrewd insight, her felicitous irony, and the fruitful harvest of her quiet eye, they are palled by the laboured unrealities of her competitors. ... "

And when the author says -

"She walks without irons to keep her in shape, or stilts to exalt her. Her diction is innocent of sesquipedalia verba; her manners and deportment were learnt under no Gallic dancing-master. If she occasionally dons a piece of bijouterie, be assured that it is no paste jewellery, and that Birmingham was not its birthplace. The fresh bloom upon her cheek comes from fresh air and sound health, not from the rouge-pot or any cognate source. Between this novel-writer and the conventional novel-wright, what a gulf profound! Alike, but oh, how different!"

He or she is extolling her writer, praise disguised poetically.

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" ... We may well admit, with one of the authors of "Guesses at Truth," that ordinary novels, which string a number of incidents and a few commonplace pasteboard characters around a love-story, teaching people to fancy that the main business of life is to make love, and to be made love to, and that, when it is made, all is over, are little or nothing else than mischievous; since it is most hurtful to be wishing to act a romance of this kind in real life—most hurtful to fancy that the interest of life lies in its pleasures and passions, not in its duties. But then Miss Austen's are not ordinary novels; hers are not pasteboard characters; and, with all her devotion to the task of delineating this master-principle, she, too, teaches that it is not the main business of life—she, too, contends that duty is before pleasure and passion, sense before sensibility. ... Miss Austen's estimate of love in its true form is as far as can be from that of sickly sentimentalism or flighty school girlishness. She honours it only when invested with the dignity, intensity, and equable constancy of its higher manifestations—where it comprehends and fulfils its wide circle of duties, and is as self-denying as it is self-respecting. There is a righteous intolerance of the mawkish trash which constitutes the staple of so many love-tales, and one cannot but admire Horace Walpole, for once, when he stops unpatiently at the fourth volume of "Sir Charles Grandison," and confesses: "I am so tired of sets of people getting together, and saying, 'Pray, miss, with whom are you in love!' etc., etc." And we grant that Miss Austen is a little too prodigal of scenes of love-making and preparations for match-making; but let us at the same time insist upon the marked difference between her descriptions and those of the common herd of novelists, with whom she is unjustly confounded; the fact being, that her most caustic passages, and the hardest hits and keenest thrusts of her satire, are directed against them and their miss-in-her-teens' extravaganzas. Mr. Thackeray himself is not more sarcastic against snobbism, than is Miss Austen against whatever is affected or perverted, or merely sentimental, in the province of love."

" ... Nothing can be more judicious than her use of suggestions and intimations of what is to follow. And all is conducted with a quiet grace that is, or seems to be inimitable."

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"If this paper has something of the rechauffé odour of a "retrospective" review, it is written not without a "prospective" purpose; the writer being persuaded that Jane Austen needs but to be more widely known, to be more justly appreciated, and accordingly using this opportunity "by way of remembrance." ... "

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September 14, 2021 - September 14, 2021.

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JANE AUSTEN

by Anna Waterston (1863)

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Beautifully written. Was this another niece? No, just the influence from reading Jane Austen.

"In the old Cathedral of Winchester stand the tombs of kings, with dates stretching back to William Rufus and Canute; here, too, are the marble effigies of queens and noble ladies, of crusaders and warriors, of priests and bishops. But our pilgrimage led us to a slab of black marble set into the pavement of the north aisle, and there, under the grand old arches, we read the name of Jane Austen. Many-coloured as the light which streams through painted windows, came the memories which floated in our soul as we read the simple inscription: happy hours, gladdened by her genius, weary hours, soothed by her touch; the honoured and the wise who first placed her volumes in our hand; the beloved ones who had lingered over her pages, the voices of our distant home, associated with every familiar story."

" ... Her life was passed chiefly in the country. Bath, then a fashionable watering-place, with occasional glimpses of London, must have afforded all the intercourse which she held with what is called "the world." Her travels were limited to excursions in the vicinity of her father's residence. Those were days of post-chaises and sedan-chairs, when the rush of the locomotive was unknown. Steam, that genie of the vapour, was yet a little household elf, singing pleasant tunes by the evening fire, at quiet hearthstones; it has since expanded into a mighty giant, whose influences are no longer domestic. The circles of fashion are changed also. Those were the days of country-dances and India muslins; the beaux and belles of "the upper rooms" at Bath knew not the whirl of the waltz, nor the ceaseless involvements of "the German." Yet the measures of love and jealousy, of hope and fear, to which their hearts beat time, would be recognised tonight in every ballroom. Infinite sameness, infinite variety, are not more apparent in the outward than in the inward world, and the work of that writer will alone be lasting who recognises and embodies this eternal law of the great author.

"Jane Austen possessed in a remarkable degree this rare intuition. The following passage is found in Sir Walter Scott's journal, under date of the fourteenth of March, 1826:—"Read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's finely written novel of 'Pride and Prejudice.' That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. ... It is amid the dreary entries in his journal of 1826, many of which make our hearts ache and our eyes overflow. He read the pages of Jane Austen on the fourteenth of March, and on the fifteenth he writes, "This morning I leave 39 Castle Street for the last time." It was something to have written a book sought for by him at such a moment. Even at Malta, in December, 1831, when the pressure of disease, as well as of misfortune, was upon him, Sir Walter was often found with a volume of Miss Austen in his hand, and said to a friend, "There is a finishing-off in some of her scenes that is really quite above everybody else." "

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"A pleasant anecdote, told to us on good authority in England, is illustrative of Miss Austen's power over various minds. A party of distinguished literary men met at a country-seat; among them was Macaulay, and, we believe, Hallam; at all events, they were men of high reputation. While discussing the merits of various authors, it was proposed that each should write down the name of that work of fiction which had given him the greatest pleasure. Much surprise and amusement followed; for, on opening the slips of paper, seven bore the name of "Mansfield Park,"—a coincidence, of opinion most rare, and a tribute to an author unsurpassed."

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" ... While the English language is read, the world will always be provided with souls who can enjoy the rare excellence of that rich legacy left to them by her genius."

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September 14, 2021 - September 14, 2021.

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HUNTING FOR SNARKES AT LYME REGIS

from Fanny Caroline Lefroy (1879)

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Was this a niece, or her daughter? They all, or many of them, aspired to write, and did write well, even if it was only about the beloved Jane Austen.

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"Yes, we must go somewhere during these cruel north-easterly winds. We must leave the flowers that will blow in spite of them, the tulips, the polyanthuses, the crimson-and-white daisies that fill our suburban garden with beauty we cannot enjoy. We must leave the golden leaves that so reluctantly come forth to the bitter air, and, as the now famous Jane Austen used playfully to say, mindful no doubt of its evil character, "this north-eastern being equally against our skin and conscience," we must seek a shelter from its cutting breath. Let us go to Lyme Regis, a place that she has immortalised, and there, if the guide-books are to be trusted, we may walk on the sands and parade, or sit and bask in the sunshine, if haply we can get any, even in the midst of the Blackthorn winter, with impunity. There also we may have the amusement of testing her proverbial accuracy, and of tracing the steps of that party, and ascertaining the precise spot of that accident which has made the Cobb more famous than any wonders of its construction. Hunting for snarkes is a very pleasant occupation if you do but make believe strong enough, and Jane Austen's creatures shall be realities to us as long as we stay at Lyme Regis.

"We happened also to know that when Mr. Tennyson went there, and his friends wanted to show him the precise spot where the Duke of Monmouth landed, he exclaimed with an indignation equally creditable to his own genius and to hers, "Don't talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth. Show me that precise spot where Louise Musgrave fell."

"Everyone must surely perceive that to ascertain that precise spot and satisfy his most laudable curiosity was an object worthy of our best endeavours and of our highest ambition. To Lyme Regis therefore, one very cold day in the middle of last May, we went, and I may as well say at once that we found it as to warmth entirely satisfactory. The hill which rises behind the town quite shelters it from north wind, and as it curves to the east and joins the pretty line of cliffs which sweeps almost round to Portland Island, it scarcely feels even the north-easterns. Indeed, the parade is only open to winds that blow from the south, south-east, or south-west, especially south-east, and this fact was our first proof of Jane Austen's accuracy, for she speaks of the bloom in Anne Elliot's face being produced by the "fine south-easterly wind" she had been meeting."

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So they visited Lyme Regis, with a journey that sounds as dangerous as it seemed arduous, to lodgings she says were unique to the place.

" ... Then there were two ground floors, one in its proper place, containing kitchen entrance and dining-room, and the other at the top of the house, containing the bedrooms and back door, which latter opened on to the green hill behind. ... Nothing could fit better, and we counted the bedrooms and arranged the party, and settled which was the chamber to which Louise Musgrave was carried, when the word "carried" struck us all dumb. That dreadful staircase; could any man, even though a sailor, have carried any young lady up that dark and crooked ladder?—and not only dark and crooked, but with a projecting beam in the darkest corner, from which one could scarcely save one's own head. She might, indeed, have been carried up the steps on the outside of the house and so in at the back door, as our boxes had been, there being no other way of getting them into our rooms; but we dared not suppose so unusual a mode of entrance, and were reluctantly obliged to give up the idea."

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"Our first step was to go to the library to get 'Persuasion'—that is, if we could, about which we had some doubt; for some few years ago, when in Bath, being anxious to amuse ourselves with verifying all the places and streets, etc., mentioned in it and in 'Northanger Abbey,' we turned into a library close to Milsom Street, and asked for the volume, we were told not only that they had not got it, but had never even heard of Jane Austen! And what was still worse, and hurt our feelings more, was that when we sought the inn which her genius has made so memorable, though we indeed found it, lo and behold! it was no longer the White Hart, it had sunk into the Queen, or the Royal Hotel, or something equally commonplace. It was some consolation to discover the displaced old sign, the veritable gold-collared white hart standing in an obscure corner not very far off. Lyme, however, proved more grateful. The library not only contained the volume, but someone had added to its title, "A Story of the Cobb." By its help we could trace the movements of the whole party through those two eventful days. ... "

"We could not pass the assembly-rooms without remembering that she had danced in them, for at the time of her visit to Lyme she was only twenty-eight; young and pretty enough still to attract the admiring eyes of strangers, and to secure her more partners than she in her moderation wanted. Where she and her father and mother lodged in Lyme is not known; they were there in the September of 1804. Either just before or after this they were at Teignmouth, where they had lodgings in a house called "Great Bella Vista," which is still standing, and bears the same fantastic name. It is rather remarkable that there should be no allusion in any of her works to this latter place, unless it be in 'Sense and Sensibility,' which, though written before 1804, was not published until afterwards. Her description of the situation of Barten Cottage is that of one who had seen the country "four miles north of Exeter," as no doubt in passing from Bath to Teignmouth, or from Teignmouth to Bath, she had done, and it might have been retouched when preparing the MS. for publication. Of this visit to Devonshire there is no mention in the Life written by her nephew a few years ago.

"Of course everyone knows the Cobb. It was first constructed two years after the accession of Edward III., and then consisted only of wooden piles incapable of long resisting the force of the storms which swept over them. Of wood, however, it continued to be remade as often as destroyed, until the time of James I., when somebody had the genius to build it of stone. ... "

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They discovered there had been more than one severe storm, sweeping away much described by Jane Austen.

" ... Nothing, therefore, remains to Lyme of any historical interest. The railways have brought other and prettier places within easier reach, and any revival of her importance and prosperity does not seem probable. She ought to be dear, however, to the hearts of all geologists, for out of her blue lias cliffs came the first of the ichthyosauri and the plesiosauri found in this country, and still when her rocks are blasted or there is a fresh landslip some pre-Adamite reliques may be found. Once they might have been picked up amongst the shingle; but the pickers-up have been so numerous there are none left worth stooping for. However, I should like to say a word to recommend that particular corner of Devonshire to the notice of artists. I say Devonshire, because Lyme is only one mile from that county, and its greatest beauties lie over the boundary. I think anyone who would take Jane Austen's advice and go to Pinhay would find himself abundantly rewarded, and that he might work there for days without exhausting its beauties."

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"The cliffs from Lyme to Sidmouth offer also a most remarkable variety of tint. At Lyme, as has been before mentioned, they are mainly of blue lias, at Seaton they are of chalk and red marl, at Beer they are of chalk alone, at Sidmouth they are of chalk and red sandstone. Beautiful as are the greys and purples that the blue lias changes into, they offer a much smaller variety of colour than do the red sandstone of Sidmouth. These range from yellow and light red to the deepest ensanguined browns, and their gorgeous hues are often reflected in the waves which break and curdle into rose-coloured tints as they ebb and flow. Then the greys that form their shadows are so exquisite, the blue mists that gather in their hollows, the white clouds which crown their heads or hang about their peaks, are so beautiful, that they surely deserve that some artist should paint their loveliness. The Peak Hills also are splendid. Standing halfway up one you have a foreground of green turf with the red hill rising up to the clouds on your right, from which you are separated by a deep chasm of some three hundred feet, at the bottom of which is the sea. In front rises the other and higher Peak Hill, yellow and red, and grey and purple, with here and there a streak of green turf or a patch of scrub—and beyond that a long line of cliffs, of which the very palest and most distant are almost at Torquay. One or two detached rocks stand out of the base, over which the waves break, and around which the sea-gulls are perpetually flying. All this forms a picture, truly of all the tints of the rainbow never to be forgotten. But enough of the rocks. Let me say a word of sweeter and tenderer beauties.

"I should like to send every one with a sore heart or a weary brain to drive about the lanes of Devonshire in the early summer. There is not a bank which is not a feast of beauty—beauty, not awful like that of the cliffs, not melancholy like that of the moaning sea, but like that of childhood, loving and pure as if it were fresh from heaven. There are, no doubt, in many places rare ferns and rare plants, but it is not they that make the charm. No. It is the thousands of primroses, the fields and beds of blue hyacinths, the masses of red campion, all growing together in every hedgerow and upon every bank; in the midst of clusters of shining harts-tongues, and clumps of asplenium, mingled with the beautiful cut-leaved ivy and the yellow green spurge, and everywhere sprinkled over with the silver stars of the elegant little white stitchwort. It is these common things growing in such wonderful profusion that make a beauty that steals into your heart and soothes and comforts it like a word of love—a beauty which, like the songs of the birds, fills you with an emotion you cannot clothe in words—redolent of the tenderness which makes the sparrows its care and bids us behold "the lilies of the field.""

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September 14, 2021 - September 14, 2021.

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IS IT JUST?

from Fanny Caroline Lefroy (1883)

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It's hard to imagine how much forbearance was required for the family of a genius of an author, of impeccable propriety in her personal life as well as her writing, when she was targeted- of all the things - precisely for that.

On some level, all but corporeal, it's no different from being whiplashed by strangers just for visibility of a toe. It's really not for the visibility of that toe, but punishment for courage of having stepped out of the boundary of housework slavery, at all.

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One is exasperated and indignant right off the bat, for readers of Jane Austen and her relatives as well.

""HAD Miss Austen felt more deeply, she would have written differently."

But Fanny, the author of this, reminds one of comments of Mikes about the famous incident of Queen Victoria, displeased, remarking "We are not amused" - Mikes applauded the British pride in what he said they thought was her rudeness, in an incident that, on the continent, would have had a tiniest ruler order a beheading of the offender. It's not an exact quote, memory being of reading it several decades ago.

"These words in a recent number of 'Temple Bar' are the reason why this paper is written. They are, in whatever point of view we look at them, very wide of the truth, and are not the only error their author has fallen into, nor is he the only person who thus misjudges her. It is, notwithstanding all the praises bestowed, becoming the fashion to accuse her of being shallow and cold-hearted, and her heroines of being prudish; and undoubtedly there is not to be found in her novels those highly-spiced love scenes with which we are all so familiar, but which, while requiring little genius to write, only deprave the taste and imagination of the reader."

Fanny is being as patient and courteous as it was possible in face of such horrible criticism, which is not new for any woman not exactly blending in woodwork - if one isn't accused of impropriety, one is labelled frigid; and this goes in every field, not merely of propriety or otherwise. One is either too aggressive or incapable of a career, and so on.

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"Without exaggeration, it may be said that on few other female writers has such an amount of study, criticism, and praise been bestowed as on Jane Austen. Others, notably Miss Burney, enjoyed far more fame during their lives. They sowed one week and they reaped the next; admiring crowds followed them, and their name was in everybody's mouth. They were the lions of their day and enjoyed their own lionhood. But she never knew that she was a lion, and lived and died scarcely more widely known than Cowper's old woman, who "never was heard of half a mile from home." and now her name and the praise of her works is for ever cropping up in the most unlikely places, and her admirers and readers are innumerable, ranging from Cardinal Newman (nay, it would not astonish us to find the Pope himself amongst the number) to the young Hindus in the college at Calcutta. And yet there is no modern writer of equal fame of whom the public know so little. The blank of her life in some sort impairs the interest of her books, and so far is, and has been, an injury to her fame.... "

Which is as unjust, unfair, even mindlessly stupid as it gets. What difference does it make if those books were written by a mother of ten with ten score servants and five palaces, or by a daughter of a clergyman who led a normal life in country as others in her station did? The point really is how much joy her writing gives, and to that there's no addition or subtraction either way.

" ... That blank is mainly owing to her own nearest relations. They did not perceive that genius must always, bon grè, mal grè, lift its possessor out of the class of private individuals and more or less deprive them of the shelter, as it does of the obscurity, of private life. The more rare and excellent the genius, the more interesting to the public is the character of its possessor and the incidents of his or her life. Fame cannot be separated from publicity, and those who secure it do not often wish that it should be; but now and then it comes to those who have never sought it, and to whose modesty and reserve it is really painful. ... "

It's not those who are reserved despite fame, nor their families, that are at fault; it's those who target them for the reason of the fame.

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"Surely people, even geniuses, have a right to keep their lives hidden if they shrink from fame, and their relations a right to respect such a wish, even though it injures, as it must often do, the permanence of the renown. But the destruction of Miss Austen's letters has we think hurt, not so much her literary fame, as the loveableness of her character as shown to us. This her family could not have foreseen, and would not have desired. It could not have been their wish that she should be esteemed by any of her readers and critics, hard and shallow-hearted."

Nobody has a right to do the last, not without actual proof thereof (such as having seen someone get off a horse just to kick someone poor and old sitting quietly by wayside), and the beginning sentence of that paragraph is entirely correct.

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" ... But first we must observe that it is incorrect to say that she had "only her own taste to guide her." From her earliest youth she had the help and guidance of a father and mother much above the average in point of ability, and the companionship of brothers almost all of whom were clever and scholarly. Her nephew, Mr. Austen Leigh, who gave us the very pleasant recollections and memoir published a few years ago, says that her father was so good a scholar that he could himself prepare his sons for the university, and was able to increase his income by taking pupils; and that in her "mother was to be found the germ of that ability which was concentrated in Jane, but of which almost all of her children had a share." The boys were all brought up at home, until they went out into the world, no small advantage to their sisters, who, if they did not share the teaching, must often have heard it, and have listened to grammatical instructions which, though primarily concerning Latin and Greek, could not but influence their own language."

This would be all too familiar to anyone of India, where for over a millennium the invading colonial cultures did not allow any schools (other than those restricted to islamic teaching) to exist publicly, and hence parents taught children at home, sometimes taking a few students who could be fit in the household. Women of the family learned by hearing, even when they were busy learning necessities of household - which included medicine, apart from other necessities.

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Fanny Caroline Lefroy goes on with delightful accounts of mother of Jane Austen, including a few letters written by her, before returning to the main offense given (by what thoughtkess boor?).

"We are told that neither in Miss Austen's letters nor her books do we find any traces of a spirit ill at ease and restless, and dissatisfied with its lot, and it is therefore inferred that she had never had any "serious attachment," or met with any disappointment. If by disappointment be meant the having loved without meeting any return, that is undoubtedly true. No such trouble befell her. But does the absence of restlessness and discontent imply that no "serious attachment" has ever been felt? What if the love have ended in the grave?"

Yes, and really, it's offensive that people made any insinuations just because writing of Jane Austen remained clean. So did, incidentally, that of Emily Bronte, and yet there is no other greater love story.

"Jane Austen could indeed draw "the pangs of disappointed love," and certainly knew "they were curable." And truly she must have been a fool to suppose otherwise in the vast majority of cases, but when she painted Marianne Dashwood's misery she was not describing any suffering the like of which she had herself endured, and still less in drawing Harriet Smith was she giving us any picture of her own finer nature."

The difference between the two sisters in Sense and Sensibility was that of conduct, not degree of feeling; Elinore bore her devastating silently, holding up propriety of conduct in every trying situation. There is no point in questioning whether or not Jane Austen did suffer any such thing, but it's clear when one reads her, that if in privacy of their home she was Mariane, she held Elinore higher, and aspired to be her. On the other hand there's Jane Bennet, whose suffering was borne in silence; again, there's no point speculating if Jane Austen was Jane Bennet in real life, but it is frameless when people go the other extreme and accuse her of not feeling.

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"The village of Steventon lies about half a mile from the great western road from London to Exeter, and about six from Basingstoke. Just where the lane turned off from the turnpike there stood a small public-house, where the coaches stopped before mounting the next hill to water their horses and to pick up parcels and letters, and, occasionally, passengers. Here it was, no doubt, one summer's morning that Mr. and Mrs. Austen and their daughters set off on their memorable tour into South Devon. They moved from place to place, halting at each a short time; but there is no record of where they went. It was in one of these halts that they made the acquaintance of two brothers, one of whom was a doctor and the other a clergyman. The latter fell in love with Jane Austen, as others had vainly done before. But he was so charming that he won her heart—and not only so, but such were his gifts of person and manner that even Cassandra, highly as she rated her sister, allowed he was worthy of her; and when in after-years she once spoke of him, did so as something quite exceptionally captivating and excellent. How the acquaintance was made we do not know. It might have been that Mrs. Austen, whose health was not good at the time, needed medical advice and called in the doctor, and the acquaintance with one brother led naturally to that of the other. But this is only conjecture. The clergyman was himself only a visitor in the place, as were they. However the introduction was effected, they could not have been long together. A week, or a fortnight at most, had seen the beginning and the end of the acquaintance. But brevity as to time does not always prove that the regard is only slight and fleeting. Two people staying in the same house for three or four days may have as much intercourse and come to know each other as well, or better, than they would have done in as many years if living half a dozen miles apart. And thus a few long summer days spent together in sight-seeing or in admiring the same lovely views, and the daily meetings, which a very little exertion on the gentleman's side must have been able to secure, might have given time not only for love to arise, but to have struck its roots deeply into the heart. Jane Austen so delighted in beautiful scenery that she thought it would form one of the joys of Heaven. Was it because it was in her mind associated with this sweetest summer of her life?

"When the day came for their moving on, the gentleman asked for permission to join them again at some farther point of their travels, and the permission was given. What time elapsed we do not know, but when they reached the place at which they were to meet, they received a letter from his brother announcing his death. No tidings of previous illness could have reached them to soften the shock. The hard pitiless fact is all we know. Of her suffering no word has reached us, but we do know that her sister so cherished his memory that many years afterwards, when an elderly woman, she took a good deal of trouble only to see again the brother of the man who had been so dear to Jane—surely proof enough of how dear he had been to her, and how mourned! Two facts also point to the same conclusion. Jane Austen never married, though she was solicited to do so, and from 1798 until 1810 there fell on her a strange, long silence. She wrote nothing for twelve years. Somewhere in 1804 she began 'The Watsons,' but her father died early in 1805, and it was never finished. Nearly at the same time as this grievous blow fell on her, a similar sorrow fell also on her sister. The young clergyman to whom she was engaged died of yellow fever in the West Indies. He had been one of her father's pupils, and she must therefore have known him from childhood and the attachment have been the growth of many years; but scarcely more is known of this story than the other.

"United in the closest and tenderest affection, Cassandra's sorrow could have been scarcely less to Jane than her own, or Jane's to Cassandra. To each other their griefs were confided, and to each other alone."

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"Is it not much more probable that this double affliction was the cause of Jane Austen's long silence, than that she who had been writing ever since she was sixteen, or indeed ever since she could hold a pen, should have lost both power and inclination because a single publisher had rejected 'Pride and Prejudice'? She had written, as all true genius does, as the bird sings, because she must, neither for fame nor for money; and it is not one disappointment which would have stopped her. To write was a necessity of her nature, and nature is only suddenly changed by some sudden shock. The blow must have paralysed her imagination. The sweet temper and the cheerfulness, and even playfulness of manner might have hidden the change from all save her sister, but the inclination to write was gone. She who at three-and-twenty had produced 'Lady Susan,' 'Northanger Abbey.' 'Sense and Sensibility,' and 'Pride and Prejudice,' during what should have been the finest and most productive years of her life wrote nothing! excepting the fragment which, as it seems to us, her father's death made her lay aside. Had her feelings only been skin deep, how much more might she not have given to the world! What a loss the tenacity of her affections has been! But if a happier end had been granted to her love, perhaps in the wife and the mother the genius would have disappeared altogether. It is impossible not to grieve over the destruction of the letters which would have given us a better insight into so true and lovely a spirit as hers. We are the richer for her genius, but we might have been enriched also by the posthumous companionship with a heart of such rare sweetness and strength that it would have exalted our standard, not only of the capacity of feeling in feminine nature, but in all humanity."

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" ... In manner, also, the change between those days and these is as great as in the matter of clothes, and here the change does no doubt give an appearance of coldness. It is not feeling, but the expression of feeling which has altered. If we do not wear our hearts on our sleeves, we seem to keep them on our lips, much more than formerly. Family affection was as strong then as now, but there was much more reticence in the expression of it, whether between parents and children or brothers and sisters. It is not only that nicknames were not in fashion, but "loves, dears and darlings" were much less plentifully used. ... Dear as Jane is to Lizzie in 'Pride and Prejudice' she is to her Jane and Jane only—and Elinor and Marianne in 'Sense and Sensibility,' who would in these days have certainly been Nellie and Minnie, are contented with their own unabbreviated names, without any prefix of affection. ... "

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" ... She moved about the world as much or more than most clergymen's daughters of the time, for those were days when the necessity of an annual change had not arisen, and people lived, with no other variety than a certain amount of visiting, year after year in their own houses. The Austens seem to have been more locomotive than most of their neighbours.

"In 1798 or 1799 they made their tour in South Devon; in 1802 they went to Teignmouth, where they resided some weeks in a house called Belle Vista, which is still standing. Two years afterwards they were at Lyme Regis, which Jane Austen has immortalised.

"In 1806 she went with her mother to stay at Stoneleigh Abbey, which on the death of Mrs. Mary Leigh, under the will of her brother Edward, the last Baron of the old creation, reverted to the elder branch of the family."

"These, with visits to her brothers in Kent and London, and to her other friends, formed the varieties and pleasures of her life. Not its happiness; that she found in her home and in her own warm family affections. From these also arose all her cares and most of her sorrows. In 1798 she lost her cousin, Lady Williams, who had been almost brought up with her and Cassandra, and who was married from Steventon some six years before. She was thrown from her carriage, and killed on the spot. In 1801 her father and mother left Steventon and settled in Bath, to her great grief. No young person can leave what has been the happy home of her childhood unconcerned, and to her Steventon was much more. ... The move was made on account of Mrs. Austen's health, which had for some time been very indifferent and to which it was hoped Bath would be beneficial; but there, she had a long and very severe illness, from which, she said, she owed her recovery to the prayers of her husband and the great care of her daughters. Here the father died in 1805, and the three ladies were obliged to give up the house and move into lodgings. Jane disliked Bath and thought it disagreed with her, and she must therefore have rejoiced when they were able to remove to Southampton, where they shared a house with one of her brothers. In 1809 they settled in the cottage at Chawton, which was the last home of all three; and the year after, what may be called her all too short literary life began. Perhaps it would have been longer, and she might have been spared to have given us more, but for the anxiety and fatigue she underwent in 1815 in nursing a brother through an illness, which brought him down to the very edge of the grave. She was staying with him alone when it came on, and upon her fell the greatest part of the strain. In a letter written soon afterwards, we find the first indication of failing health. It was followed by the bankruptcy of the firm of which this brother was head, the dread of which had caused his breakdown. No blame attached to him, the misfortune was produced in part by the failure of some other bank. Most of his brothers lost more or less, but they all behaved most kindly and nobly. Nevertheless it was a great blow, and Jane's health gave way beneath it. "I am the only one," she wrote, "so foolish as to have been made ill by it, but feeble nerves make a feeble body." She rallied, but never recovered, and died, to the inexpressible sorrow of all who loved her, in 1817."

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September 14, 2021 - September 14, 2021.

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A BUNDLE OF LETTERS

by Fanny Caroline Lefroy (1883)

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Author, niece (/grandniece?) of Jane Austen, discourses on letter writing, and mentions her Jane Austen's writing, novels and letters.

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"It has been said that Jane Austen's books are wanting in pathos. It is true they have none of the hysterical sentimentality, none of the morbid love of all that is painful, which are so common in the novels of the present day. Yet it can scarcely be denied that the character of Anne in 'Persuasion' is treated with a great tenderness, and drawn by a very delicate hand. This character is all the more touching for its reticence, for its modest self-control, and Anne is as womanly in her yieldingness as she is in her constancy. There has been a conjecture that Anne is Jane Austen herself, and that the story of the heroine was possibly that of the writer—only with a different ending. It is easy to believe that this may be true, although proofs are wanting. We find in Miss Austen's own letters to her family the same sweet traits, the same gentle affection, the same quiet depth of feeling that we have loved in the heroine of 'Persuasion;' and towards the end, when her health failed her, we read between the lines still more clearly, her pure unselfish nature.

""Thanks to the kindness of your father and mother" (she writes to her nephew, when she was moved to Winchester for further medical advice), "in sending me their carriage, my journey hither on Saturday was performed with very little fatigue, and had it been a fine day, I think I should have felt none; but it distressed me to see Uncle Henry and William Knight, who kindly attended us on horseback, riding in the rain almost the whole way."

"And again:—

""As to what I owe her" (her sister Cassandra), "and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion" (her illness), "I can only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and more.""

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"It has been said, and I think unfairly, that with the introduction of the penny post, died the art of letter-writing. But as long as there are people with literary instincts, and with a facility of expression; as long as there is daily life to be chronicled in all its pleasant triviality; as long as there are friends divided by thousands of miles and land and sea; so long, and this will probably be to the end of time, will letter-writing deserve to be cultivated as a fine art."

One has to wonder about the first part; but of course, now, one knows when letter writing died - when everyone could afford to call, to begin with, and later, internet, cell phones and chat killed even language!

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" ... And here are letters with strange postmarks, and foreign stamps, letters closely written on thin paper, that have travelled thousands and thousands of miles to tell you that the writer still thought of you and loved you. And there is that last one, too, over which you have shed so many tears, and which arrived after the news of his death—a simple garrulous letter winding up with "there is no news to tell you, but I shall be home again, please God, next summer," or some such phrase, which cuts you still to the heart. And so on, and so on, until you are forced to own that these poor old letters have a charm of their own that time and change can only heighten, and around which death even can but set a halo."

This happened at least twice to Austen family, and related to the same cousin - Elizabeth, daughter of aunt Philadelphia nee Austen, whose husband died in India of illness while his wife and child were in England; and then Elizabeth married a French Count Feuillade who was guillotine during the revolution while Elizabeth and her son were in England.

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September 14, 2021 - September 14, 2021.

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MISS AUSTEN'S COUNTRY (1875)

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Lovely descriptions of Jane Austen's country, with references of her works.

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"The boundaries of Miss Austen's country are just vague enough to make speculation respecting them pleasant. She liked the cosy, rich, refined, cultivated "Home" counties, and the snuggest, most prosperous parts of them. Mansfield Park was in Hertfordshire, and have we not seen many a parsonage which might be that very home in which Dr. Grant outraged the housewifely memories of Mrs. Norris by the introduction of a round dinner-table, and made little of the flavour of the fruit upon the apricot-tree which had "cost her – no, it was a present from Sir Thomas, but she had seen the bill, and it had cost seven shillings, and was charged as a Moor-Park !" Rosings was in Kent, and when we drive past those trim, lovely hedgerows and see the plantations beyond, can we not make choice among the former of the garden-boundary of that abode in which Mrs. Collins dexterously assigned the front room to her husband, so that he might relieve her of his society while he watched for the pony-carriage in which "Lady Catharine and Miss de Bourgh did his humble dwelling the honour of passing it several times a day," and see, on the fringes of the latter, the very spot where Mr. Darcy put his angry love-letter into the hand of Elizabeth Bennet, to whom, by the way, one always grudges Darcy and Pemberley a little? But it is not "Pride and Prejudice," or "Mansfield Park," which travels closely with the visitor to the Box-Hill region, so much as "Emma," that quite incomparable novel, in which the unique talent of the wonderful woman whose works may fail to charm us in our youth, but are an ever-increasing joy to our middle-age, is at its perfection. From the height we overlook the whole of her especial country (the Dashwoods were only episodically located in Devonshire, and there can be no doubt that Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth ultimately settled within easy reach of town): but Box Hill itself and all the rich and beautiful valley beneath it, are the places which we identify with "Emma." ... "

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" ... It will be so charming to know that one's topography cannot be far wrong, because Emma and her party had only seven miles to drive to Box Hill, and Hartfield was sixteen miles from London."

"It ought to be quite enough for anybody, with the touch of the autumn loveliness upon it, the delicious stillness, and the sweet, fresh air. It has every kind of beauty that the "woodland wild" can combine, from the tender grace of the slight ash and beech trees, through which the sun's rays strike into the underwood, revealing marvellous treasures of multitudinous growth and infinite variety of colour, the watchful processional formality of poplars, whose front ranks stand across country in the valley below, the massive grandeur of great acorn-laden oaks and wide-spreading, sturdy elms; firs with flame-tinted stems and storm-defying heads; gloomy, bitter, poison-fruited yew, and solemn cypress; to the masses of the sharp and shining-leaved tree, growing thick and black-stemmed in the dense darkness, which give the place its name of "Box Hill." It has dells and downs, steep, heather-bordered road, and sharp-declining hillside, openings into undulating glades, o'erarching avenues, tunnels of shade of solemn blackness, wide stretches of green-velvet turf, dense thickets in which the crushed confusion of trees defies division, grand, solitary forest-lords standing in isolated majesty, each one a picture and a marvel. It has a gorgeous tangle of autumn flower and red poison-fruit, and acres of blackberry-bushes, with a purple bloom upon their berries. There are weird paths in it, with vistas into the wood, where the stems, shut from the sun, are bleached, and sickly, and distorted, like Doré's dreadful trees, with pain and writhing in their twisted limbs; and there are broad, jocund ways, with the generous sunlit growths bordering them, adown which the wood-nymphs might dance today without surprising anybody, so surely do they seem to have been laid out on purpose; and here the giant stems are dight in moss like emerald velvet, and touched with gem-like flashes of ruby and topaze colour. There is a blue sky, with a transparent veil of hurrying clouds before it, a strong stirring and sound in the trees and the underwood; the ear might easily cheat itself into a belief that the plain below is a lake; but on the brow of the hill the whole superb scene is unrolled before one; forty miles of rich country laugh under the sunshine, and the little village of Brockham stands in its prim prettiness in the foreground of the valley, like a Dutch village just taken out of a toy-box, set up, and ready to be packed up again when the private view shall be over."

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September 14, 2021 - September 14, 2021.

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STYLE AND MISS AUSTEN

by Mary Augusta Ward (1884)

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Style, especially since a century ago or more, has come to mean - especially when the word is used in relation to a woman - her couture and her related preferences. It takes time to dawn on one, a third of the way through, that this article isnt about hiw jane Austen dressed, or liked to dress.

Mary Augusta Ward is highly indignant with the publication of Letters of Jane Austen, and with Lord Brabourne for doing so, in a tone that would have us wonder if she too was his aunt or great aunt; what she says is a mixture of propriety and personal opinion ( the latter being about which letters should have been ok to publish, if at all), but there is nothing one could take exception to - it's almost as if she were one with the two sisters, Jane Austen and Cassandra.

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"By this publication of a newly discovered collection of Miss Austen's letters, Miss Austen's great-nephew has done her as ill a turn as it is in anybody's power to do to the author of "Pride and Prejudice." The name of one of the nimblest, quickest, and least tiresome of mortals has been perforce associated with two volumes of half-edited matter, with letters of which she herself would never have authorised the publication, with family pedigrees of which she would have been the first person to feel the boredom and the incongruity, and literary criticisms of a kind to have set that keen wit of hers moving in its most trenchant fashion. When Lord Brabourne came into possession of those bundles of his great-aunt's letters which Mr. Austen Leigh, her first biographer, believed to have been lost, the temptation to make use of them in some way was no doubt irresistible. The virtue of literary reticence is fast becoming extinct; we have almost indeed forgotten that it is a virtue at all. To be able to persuade oneself that the world could possibly do without information which it is in one's power to give it, implies now a strength of mind so abnormal and so rare, that a modern instance of it is scarcely to be found. And the old distinction between public and private life, which still held firmly in the days when Jane Austen and Miss Ferrier refused to give their names to any production of their pens — the old personal reserve, which still forms part of the continental idea of the typical Englishman — have been so rapidly swept away during the last generation, that it would be absurd nowadays to expect of any inheritor of a great writer's correspondence that he should form the same sort of strict judgment on its claims to publication which would have been natural and possible a hundred or even fifty years ago. Taste is laxer, the public easier to please, and book-making more profitable. A modern editor of unpublished documents, by the nature of things, approaches his task in a more prodigal frame of mind. The whole mood of the present day is one of greater indulgence towards what may be called the personal side of letters than used to be the case with our grandfathers; and the seven volumes which Mr. Froude has devoted to the Carlyles, and which, under all the circumstances, would have been a scandal in the days of Southey and Scott, will perhaps be accepted later on as marking the highest point of a tendency which has been long gathering strength and may not improbably soon have to fight against reaction.

"Lord Brabourne, then, hardly deserves serious blame for not deciding as Mr. Austen Leigh would have probably decided twenty years ago, that the newly discovered correspondence threw practically no fresh light on Miss Austen's personality, and, with half-a-dozen exceptions, which might have seen the light in a review, had therefore better be reserved for that family use for which it was originally intended; but he might at least have set some bounds to his confidence in the public. One small volume of these letters, carefully chosen and skilfully edited, would have been pleasant reading enough. They might have been used as illustrations of the novels, of the country society or the class relations of eighty years ago, and a few short explanations of the identity of the persons most frequently mentioned in them would have made them sufficiently intelligible to the general reader. As it is, the letters of the last fifteen years of Jane Austen's life dull the edge of whatever gentle enjoyment the reader may have derived from the sprightliness of the earlier ones, while the one literary merit which the collection possesses, its lightness and airiness of tone, is lost in the ponderous effect of the introductory chapters, with their endless strings of names and wandering criticisms on the novels. ... "

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" ... "Northanger Abbey" especially, gay, sparkling, and rapid as it is from beginning to end, is the book in which the bright energy of Jane Austen's youth finds its gayest and freshest expression. ... "

Northanger Abbey? Gay? Sparkling???? Good heavens, it's a horror story! Not a horror story on par with Hamlet, but quite halfway there!

"Miss Austen's novels are a well-worn subject. We have all read her, or ought to have read her; we all know what Macaulay and what Scott thought of her and the qualities of her humour, the extent of her range, have been pointed out again and again. Perhaps, after all, however, it may be still worthwhile to try and face the question which these disappointing letters bring home to one. How was it that, with all her lack of knowledge and of ideas, and with her comparative lack of passion, which so often supplies the place of both, Jane Austen accomplished work so permanent and so admirable? What is it, in a word, which makes "Pride and Prejudice" and "Northanger Abbey" English classics, while the books of her contemporaries, Miss Ferrier and Miss Edgeworth, have practically lost their hold upon our sympathies, and are retreating year by year into a dimmer background? ... "

It's unclear why, reading letters to a sister with intimate trivial details, one would judge Jane Austen to have been completely devoid of higher thought or ideas, concerns and more. All the more so since the publication was long after the sister had reportedly destroyed the parts she thought were private, after Jane Austen had departed and her fame being on the rise made Cassandra worry about privacy.

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"Another striking instance of this choosing instinct of hers is the description of Darcy’s place, Pemberley, in "Pride and Prejudice." There, although there is scarcely any description at all, every stroke of the pen is so managed that any reader with ordinary attention may realise, if he pleases, the whole lie of the park, the look of the house, as Elizabeth surveyed it from the opposite side of the ravine above which it stood, the relative positions of the lawns, stables, and woods. Anybody with a turn that way could sketch it with ease, and yet there is no effort, no intention to describe, nothing but a clear and vivid imagination working with that self-restraint, that concentration, which is the larger half of style. This self-restraint indeed is her important, her determining quality. In other ways she has great deficiencies. For fine instances of the qualities of expansion we must go elsewhere than to Jane Austen. Emotion, inspiration, glow, and passion are not hers; she is a small, thin classic. But classic she is; for her work is a typical English embodiment of those drier and more bracing elements of style in which French literature has always been rich, and our own perhaps comparatively poor."

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September 14, 2021 - September 14, 2021.

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AN EXCERPT FROM

Memoirs of John Murray

by Samuel Smiles (1891)

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Murray published works of Jane Austen, after first two, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, had been published by Egerton.

Here there is correspondence relating to publication of Emma, between Murray and the people he wrote to ask for an article on Emma.

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September 15, 2021 - September 15, 2021.

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LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

by Andrew Lang (1892)

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Beautiful, delicious response to all detractors of Jane Austen, written in form of a letter to Jane Austen, a letter written in the beautiful style with rectitude and propriety that would suit a letter to Jane Austen written by a gentleman, of her times with education and courteous demeanour.

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"Madam — If to the enjoyments of your present state be lacking a view of the minor infirmities or foibles of men, I cannot but think (were the thought permitted) that your pleasures are yet incomplete. Moreover, it is certain that a woman of parts who has once meddled with literature will never wholly lose her love for the discussion of that delicious topic, nor cease to relish what (in the cant of our new age) is styled "literary shop." For these reasons I attempt to convey to you some inkling of the present state of that agreeable art which you, madam, raised to its highest pitch of perfection.

""As to your own works (immortal, as I believe), I have but little that is wholly cheering to tell one who, among women of letters, was almost alone in her freedom from a lettered vanity. You are not a very popular author: your volumes are not found in gaudy covers on every bookstall; or, if found, are not perused with avidity by the Emmas and Catherines of our generation. 'Tis not long since a blow was dealt (in the estimation of the unreasoning) at your character as an author by the publication of your familiar letters. The editor of these epistles, unfortunately, did not always take your witticisms, and he added others which were too unmistakably his own. While the injudicious were disappointed by the absence of your exquisite style and humour, the wiser sort were the more convinced of your wisdom. In your letters (knowing your correspondents) you gave but the small personal talk of the hour, for them sufficient; for your books you reserved matter and expression which are imperishable. Your admirers, if not very numerous, include all persons of taste, who, in your favour, are apt somewhat to abate the rule, or shake off the habit, which commonly confines them to but temperate laudation.

"'Tis the fault of all art to seem antiquated and faded in the eyes of the succeeding generation. The manners of your age were not the manners of today, and young gentlemen and ladies who think Scott "slow," think Miss Austen "prim" and "dreary." Yet, even could you return among us, I scarcely believe that, speaking the language of the hour, as you might, and versed in its habits, you would win the general admiration. For how tame, madam, are your characters, especially your favourite heroines! How limited the life which you knew and described! How narrow the range of your incidents! How correct your grammar!

"As heroines, for example, you chose ladies like Emma, and Elizabeth, and Catherine; women remarkable neither for the brilliance nor for the degradation of their birth; women wrapped up in their own and the parish's concerns, ignorant of evil, as it seems, and unacquainted with vain yearnings and interesting doubts. Who can engage his fancy with their match-makings and the conduct of their affections, when so many daring and dazzling heroines approach and solicit his regard?

"Here are princesses dressed in white velvet stamped with golden fleurs-de-lys – ladies with hearts of ice and lips of fire, who count their roubles by the million, their lovers by the score, and even their husbands, very often, in figures of some arithmetical importance. With these are the immaculate daughters of itinerant Italian musicians – maids whose souls are unsoiled amidst the contaminations of our streets, and whose acquaintance with the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Daedalus and Scopas, is the more admirable, because entirely derived from loving study of the inexpensive collections vended by the plaster-of-Paris man round the corner. When such heroines are wooed by the nephews of dukes, where are your Emmas and Elizabeths? Your volumes neither excite nor satisfy the curiosities provoked by that modern and scientific fiction, which is greatly admired, I learn, in the United States, as well as in France and at home.

"You erred, it cannot be denied, with your eyes open. Knowing Lydia and Kitty so intimately as you did, why did you make of them almost insignificant characters? With Lydia for a heroine you might have gone far; and, had you devoted three volumes, and the chief of your time, to the passions of Kitty, you might have held your own, even now, in the circulating library. How Lyddy, perched on a corner of the roof, first beheld her Wickham; how, on her challenge, he climbed up by a ladder to her side; how they kissed, caressed, swung on gates together, met at odd seasons, in strange places, and finally eloped: all this might have been put in the mouth of a jealous elder sister, say Elizabeth, and you would not have been less popular than several favourites of our time. Had you cast the whole narrative into the present tense, and lingered lovingly over the thickness of Mary's legs and the softness of Kitty's cheeks, and the blonde fluffiness of Wickham's whiskers, you would have left a romance still dear to young ladies."

"Or, again, you might entrance fair students still, had you concentrated your attention on Mrs. Rushworth, who eloped with Henry Crawford. These should have been the chief figures of "Mansfield Park." But you timidly decline to tackle passion. “Let other pens," you write, "dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can." Ah, there is the secret of your failure! Need I add that the vulgarity and narrowness of the social circles you describe impair your popularity? I scarce remember more than one lady of title, and but very few lords (and these unessential) in all your tales. Now, when we all wish to be in society, we demand plenty of titles in our novels, at any rate, and we get lords (and very queer lords) even from republican authors, born in a country which in your time was not renowned for its literature. ... "

Oh, what a satisfactory slap to the likes of Firkins, whose aspersions cast on the dead Jane Austen, not only against her works alone, but her person as well, were so much of a torture to her loving and loyal relatives, especially all the more so because they were baseless and false, with no other objective than gain of a name for oneself by using name of someone who couldn't respond, because she wasn't only a lady, she was also resting in her final resting place in her tomb in Winchester cathedral.

And he continues.

" ... I have heard a critic remark, with a decided air of fashion, on the brevity of the notice which your characters give each other when they offer invitations to dinner. "An invitation to dinner next day was despatched," and this demonstrates that your acquaintance "went out" very little, and had but few engagements. How vulgar, too, is one of your heroines, who bids Mr. Darcy "keep his breath to cool his porridge." I blush for Elizabeth! It were superfluous to add that your characters are debased by being invariably mere members of the Church of England as by law established. The dissenting enthusiast, the open soul that glides from esoteric Buddhism to the Salvation Army, and from the higher pantheism to the higher paganism, we look for in vain among your studies of character. Nay, the very words I employ are of unknown sound to you; so how can you help us in the stress of the soul's travailings?

"You may say that the soul's travailings are no affair of yours; proving thereby that you have indeed but a lowly conception of the duty of the novelist. I only remember one reference, in all your works, to that controversy which occupies the chief of our attention – the great controversy on creation or evolution. Your Jane Bennet cries: "I have no idea of there being so much design in the world as some persons imagine." Nor do you touch on our mighty social question, the land laws, save when Mrs. Bennet appears as a land reformer, and rails bitterly against the cruelty "of settling an estate away from a family of five daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about." There, madam, in that cruelly unjust performance, what a text you had for a tendenz-romanz. Nay, you can allow Kitty to report that a private had been flogged, without introducing a chapter on flogging in the army. But you formally declined to stretch your matter out, here and there, "with solemn specious nonsense about something unconnected with the story." No "padding" for Miss Austen! In fact, madam, as you were born before analysis came in, or passion, or realism, or naturalism, or irreverence, or religious open-mindedness, you really cannot hope to rival your literary sisters in the minds of a perplexed generation. ... I think one prefers them so, and that English women should be more like Anne Elliot than Maggie Tulliver. "All the privilege I claim for my own sex is that of loving longest when existence or when hope is gone," said Anne; perhaps she insisted on a monopoly that neither sex has all to itself. ... "

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September 15, 2021 - September 15, 2021.

Kindle Edition, 132 pages

Published January 25th 2018

ASIN:- B079BX6Z7V

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A GIRL'S OPINION ON JANE AUSTEN

by Edith Edlmann (1892)

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Very well said.

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"It has been said that the literature of a nation finds a place in the heart of men proportionately as it is able to reveal the deeper meaning—the inner heart, which lies beneath the apparent trivialities of daily life.

"To become a permanent inheritance, we know that it must reflect mankind simply and truly in ordinary garb and varying mood. Do the works of Jane Austen fulfil these requirements? In part, we must allow they do. Writing in an age when literature was forced and unnatural, when fiction was encumbered with the artificial mannerisms, the stilted rhetoric, the far-fetched plot and incidents of the romantic school and contaminated by the evil influence of effeted French Court taste, it is to the enduring merit of three English-women, Miss Ferrier, Miss Edgeworth, but above all to Miss Austen, that public taste was led into simpler and purer channels. What Wordsworth was to poetry, Miss Austen was to fiction—the pioneer of a reformation. The novel in her hands became a means of enjoyment to people of taste and intelligence; something that it was neither a shame to have written nor to have read. Miss Lydia Languish need no longer throw her book under the sofa or behind the spinnet when she heard approaching footsteps.

"Walter Bagehot, in one of his literary studies, speaks of the keen enjoyment of novel-reading as the prerogative of youth. No doubt our love for many authors is a youthful and passing taste, but in the instance of Miss Austen the case seems to be reversed. Here we find a girl writing of girls, whose warmest admirers for nearly one hundred years are found, not so much among other young people, as among savants and men of letters. The youthful enthusiasms of the many are not poured out over her as over Scott and Dickens, but the constant affection of the few and cultured still keeps her in her niche of the temple of fame.

"Jane Austen is known today as the "critic's novelist." By her purity and simplicity of style she has been capable of fascinating such men as Scott, Macaulay, Tennyson, Sydney Smith, Whately, Whewell, Coleridge, Southey, Spedding, Leslie Stephen, and many more; a style considered by Cardinal Newman to be so perfect that, to improve his own, he at one time read her works through yearly. She delights them with her perfect manner of treating commonplace matter, charms them with the descriptions of the daily lives of our great-grandmothers, whose occupations, feelings, ways, and manners are given with the "minuteness of a miniature painter"—or as they tell us, like a master of the Flemish school. The subject is ordinary enough and oft repeated, the skill lies in the wonderful accuracy of the artist's hand and eye.

" ... Every occurrence is reproduced with the truthfulness of a girl who described things as she saw them, and not as they were drawn in the artificial light of her day. Our admiration is the more aroused when we consider how very young that girl was. Before we read many pages of her work, we become aware that all she describes is familiar. We have assisted at such scenes as she depicts; those small pleasures, those small mortifications of which we read, have touched the surface of our lives. We, ourselves, have taken part in drawing-room, dining-room, ball-room scenes such as she paints, we have met such people as inhabit her world repeatedly. There is the merit of much good-natured gossip, but no scandal in her pages, for hers is a wit that laughs, but does not know how to sneer; at times it is so Addisonian that we wonder she has no better word for the Spectator."

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" ... "It is a universally acknowledged truth that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." These words commence her best novel and form the keynote of all. Had she added, "and the average mother with several daughters considers it her mission in life to fill that want," we should be possessed of the entire situation. In fact, if it were not for the bulkiness of the volume, and the size of the family party, all her characters and plots might be contained under one cover. For in these pages we meet with nothing more harrowing or exciting than the hopes and fears, the managements and heart-burnings, which arise before the music of the wedding-bells and consumption of the wedding-cake. That any other destination should await her heroine is—to Miss Austen—evidently an impossibility. Richardson may give us a Clarissa, and "make the eyes of a Scott weep and his heart ache." Miss Austen only gives us Emmas, Fannys, Elizas, all happily married in the last chapter to the most delightfully amiable and moral young men, of modest demeanour and more than modest fortune. If, by chance, providence has happened to forget ways and means before, she now makes amends by dropping a comfortable rectory into the happy young man's lap, or, more correctly speaking, by dropping the happy young man into the comfortable rectory, where he is conspicuously fitted by his extreme youth to inspire his flock with the wisdom of his precepts, and guide them through the wealth of his inexperience.

"If, however, her plots are wanting in variety they have other merits which cannot be overlooked. The extreme naturalness with which all the small complications are invested, the easy transition from incident to incident, the compactness of design, the charming way details dovetail and apparently chance remarks connect situations delight us as we watch the unfolding story. The skill with which the numerous young people are steered past shoals and quicksands into the matrimonial haven elicits our admiration and rivals in temerity that of a writer in our own day, Miss Charlotte Yonge, who brings equally large families to an equally successful anchorage."

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"In character painting she stands unrivalled. No writer has a happier knack of presenting character in so few words, so rapidly, so graphically. When she tells us that "Darcy possesses all the goodness, and Wickham all the appearance of it," the moral character of those two men is before us in a nutshell ... "

""Miss Bates enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, or married. She stood in the worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favour; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her, into outward respect. She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without goodwill. It was her own universal goodwill and contented temper which worked such wonders. She loved everybody, was interested in everybody's happiness, quick-sighted to everybody's merits... The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to everybody, and a mine of felicity to herself. She was a great talker on little matters... full of trivial communications and harmless gossip.""

"For her older men, like Darcy and Knightley, we have nothing but praise. Their unobtrusive goodness of heart, their unselfishness and thought for others, delight us. But her younger heroes ... With the exception of Captain Wentworth and William Price, in the later works, there is nothing strong or manly about them. So unlike the young men of today are they, that we are tempted to think they must be drawn from imagination rather than observation. It is hard to believe that such types represent Englishmen of not more than a century ago. Athletics, cricket, boating, golf, steeple-chasing are unknown pastimes to her country gentlemen."

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"Before leaving our subject we cannot pass unnoticed Miss Austen's merits as a contemporary, though unconscious, historian. The material is not such as Dr. Bright might use, but rather such as would delight a Macaulay. From her pages we gain a clear insight into the manners and customs of the middle-class provincial life of the last century, and gather a plain idea of the position and importance of landowners, of the state of church and church patronage, of class distinctions at that period. We read of days of franked letters and of a twopenny London post, of times when umbrellas were not universal, but when mail coaches and post-chaises were. Then writing was considered a fine art, then sailors were rich, and farmers and landowners prosperous. Then at balls country dances with innumerable steps were danced, and furious polkas and kitchen lancers lay undreamt of in the future ; then the card table was a nightly institution for dowagers and old gentlemen, and then people with any pretence at "elegance" or "gentility" dined at five o'clock. We learn also that managing mothers and garrison girls are not the exclusive product of the nineteenth century. But in no respect is the difference between the past and present more distinctly marked than in the position of the clergy, and in the prevailing ideas of the responsibilities of a parish priest."

" ... Crawford offers to rent Edmund Bertram's rectory on the supposition that Edmund will wish to live at home and will use the income of £700 a year for personal pleasure, considering the sum total of the sacrifice of taking orders to be a sermon at Christmas or Easter. Not that it was even necessary to write the discourse, as Blair, it is suggested, could always be made to supply original deficiencies. As there was no distinction between the dress of a clergyman and that of an ordinary gentleman, Mr. Tilney's coat with many capes was much admired by his lady friends. He spent two days a week in his parish, when not at Bath; this act was considered by them to show extreme, if not unnecessary, devotion to his calling."

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September 15, 2021 - September 15, 2021.

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https://www.mollands.net/etexts/other/girlsopin.html

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A JANE AUSTEN LETTER

by M. A. De Wolfe Howe (1925)

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A JANE AUSTEN LETTER;

by M. A. De Wolfe Howe (1925).

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To someone who's loved reading Jane Austen, is familiar with England and has called Boston home for a while, this is a delight.

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"On July 18, 1917, there would doubtless have been a fitting celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the death of Jane Austen if at that moment the civilised world had not been battling for its life. Instead of waiting for another century to pass, it is well to recall the fact that Jane Austen was born December 16, 1775, and, since a centennial acknowledgement of the world's debt to her was impracticable, to remind the multitudes who recognise this debt that the sesquicentenary of her birth may be celebrated on December 16, 1925.

"But for the approach of this anniversary, I should hardly have been led—as I have been recently—to look into an old collection of autographs which illustrates conspicuously the wisdom of not throwing too many private papers away and of preserving in some degree of order those that are spared. It was after the turning of many pages that I came upon the autograph letter of Jane Austen's which there was reason to hope the collection might contain. If that had been all, it would have been a pleasant but relatively unimportant discovery, for the greater part of the letter may be found in print in the second edition of J.E. Austen Leigh's "Memoir" of his aunt. In both the first and the second edition the letter to Jane Austen's brother, Admiral Sir Francis William Austen, which caused the "a.l.s." to be sent to America, is printed ... "

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The author quotes the letter from Miss Quincy, Boston, Massachusetts, to Francis Austen, asking if he or a member of his family could consent to be received by her many fans in Boston, and could get them an autograph from her.

"To this letter from Miss Eliza Susan Quincy, one of the five daughters of Josiah Quincy, President of Harvard University from 1829 to 1845, and a collaborator with her father in much of his writing, Admiral Austen made reply in the following letter, hitherto unprinted. This brother, born in 1774, one year before Jane Austen, and seventy-eight years old in 1852, died at ninety-one in 1865, as Admiral of the Fleet, the officer of highest rank in the British Navy. Early in his distinguished career he had borne an important part in the naval warfare of the Napoleonic period, especially as captain of the Canopus in the battle of St. Domingo.

"Portsdown Lodge

"Ports. Jany. 31st 1852

"Madam,

"Altho' a letter I lately received dated "Boston Massachusetts Jany. 6th 1852" bears no signature, yet I can hardly be mistaken in attributing it to the Lady to whom I am requested to address my reply.

"I can have no hesitation in assuring you that it was most gratifying to me to receive such a testimonial to the merits of my late sister's works, and thereby to learn that their celebrity had reached across the Atlantic.

"With reference to the wish of obtaining more information relative to the life of Jane Austen, than is given in the brief memorial affixed to her latest work, I can only say, that there is little I could add to it of a nature to be interesting to strangers. Passing the greater part of her life if not in absolute retirement, yet so much out of what is commonly meant by the world, rarely mixing with any but intimate friends and near relations, that it would be a matter of some difficulty to recall any circumstance worth relating.

"Of the liveliness of her imagination and playfulness of her fancy, as also of the truthfulness of her description of character and deep knowledge of the human mind, there are sufficient evidence in her works; and it has been a matter of surprise to those who knew her best, how she could at a very early age and with apparently limited means of observation, have been capable of nicely discriminating and portraying such varieties of the human character as are introduced in her works.—In her temper she was cheerful and not easily irritated, and tho' rather reserved to strangers so as to have been by some accused of haughtiness and manner, yet in the company of those she loved the native benevolence of her heart and kindliness of her disposition were forcibly displayed. On such occasions she was a most agreeable companion and by the lively sallies of her wit and good-humoured drollery seldom failed of exciting the mirth and hilarity of the party. She was fond of children and a favourite with them. Her nephews and nieces of whom there were many could not have a greater treat than crowding around and listening to Aunt Jane's stories. I have in my possession several of her letters written to an intimate friend, who subsequently became my wife and is now deceased. From these I select one to forward herewith in the confident belief that no improper use will be made of it. It will be at once a specimen of her hand-writing and of the playfulness of her mind. The incidents to which it adverts could be interesting only to those acquainted with the parties. All mentioned in it are dead with the exception of the one named "Charles." There is no date of year affixed, but from collateral circumstances it must have been written as early as 1798 or 99. I scarcely need observe that there never was the remotest idea of its being published.—I shall be glad to know that my letter arrives safely at its destination.

"Have the honour to be Madam

"Yours very truly

"Francis Wm Austen"

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The author now quotes the letter from Jane Austen, a delight in it's humour.

"The letter of Jane Austen's which her brother sent, with this communication, to Miss Quincy appears in the "Memoir" with several small omissions and lacking entirely the postscripts written on the same page—the last of the four—with the address. It should be said that Miss Martha Lloyd and Miss Austen's brother Francis were not married until 1828, when she became his second wife.

"Jane Austen to Miss Lloyd, Up-Hurstbourne, Andover.

"Steventon, Wednesday Eveng. Nov:r 12th [1800].

"My dear Martha,

"I did not receive your note yesterday till after Charlotte had left Deane, or I would have sent my answer by her, instead of being the means, as I now must be, of lessening the elegance of your new dress for the Hurstbourne ball by the value of 3d. You are very good in wishing to see me at Ibthorp so soon, and I am equally good in wishing to come to you; I believe our merit in that respect is much upon a par, our self-denial mutually strong. Having paid this tribute of praise to the virtue of both, I shall have done with panegyric and proceed to plain matter of fact.—In about a fortnight's time I hope to be with you; I have two reasons for not being able to come before; I wish so to arrange my visit as to spend some days with you after your mother's return, in the first place that I may have the pleasure of seeing her, and in the second, that I may have a better chance of bringing you back with me.—Your promise in my favour was not quite absolute, but if your will is not perverse, you and I will do all in our power to overcome your scruples of conscience.—I hope we shall meet next week to talk all this over, till we have tired ourselves with the very idea of my visit, before my visit begins.—Our invitations for the 19th are arrived, and very curiously are they worded. ... "

"Mary has heard from Cassandra today; she is now gone with Edward and Elizabeth to the Cages for two or three nights.—You distress me cruelly by your request about books; I cannot think of any to bring with me, nor have I any idea of our wanting them. I come to you to be talked to, not to read or hear reading. I can do that at home; and indeed I am now laying in a stock of intelligence to pour out on you as my share of conversation.—I am reading Henry's History of England, which I will repeat to you in any manner you may prefer, either in a loose, desultory, unconnected strain, or dividing my recital as the historian divides it himself, into seven parts, The Civil and Military—Religion—Constitution—Learning and Learned Men—Arts and Sciences—Commerce, Coins and Shipping—and Manners;—So that for every evening of the week there will be a different subject; The Friday's lot, Commerce, Coins and Shipping. You will find the least entertaining; but the next evenings portion will make amends.—With such a provision on my part, if you will do yours by repeating the French grammar, and Mrs. Stent will now and then ejaculate some wonder about the cocks and hens, what can we want?—Farewell for a short time—you are to dine here on Tuesday to meet James Digweed, whom you must wish to see before he goes into Kent.—We all united in best love, & I am

"Yr very affecte JA.—

"It is reported at Portsmouth that Sir T. Williams is going to be married—it has been reported indeed twenty times before, but Charles is inclined to give some credit to it now, as they hardly ever see him on board, and he looks very much like a lover.—

"Thursday.—The Harwoods have received a much better account of Earle this morning; and Charles, from whom I have just had a letter, has been assured by the hospital surgeon that the wound is in as favourable a state as can be."

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"Monday

"Dear Susan,

"I am quite excited at the idea of the Austen letter which Papa has described,—not exactly in the style of Miss Bates,—but still the facts that you have received a letter from the admiral and have actually in your possession one written by the very hand to which we owe so much, quite carries me off my feet!—Mr Wm Jennings delight at the idea of Col. Brandon's marrying Elinor is nothing to it! I can hardly resist rushing up instanter to behold them, and nothing but being obliged to remain at home this evening prevents me.—Dear Admiral Austen I think he must have been like Capt Wentworth when he was young,—and just like what Capt Wentworth would be at his age.—He has replied with true naval promptness, and evidently deserves to be Miss Austen's brother. Robert desires to add his sincere congratulations and thinks you most fortunate in such an autograph.—I never expected we should get so near Miss Austen in this world, tho' I have always hoped to find some "little coterie in Heaven" where I might catch a glimpse of her.—

"I have had a nice visit from Papa.—With love to all and congratulations to all true lovers of Miss Austen

"I am ever thine

"Anna.

"— If the house catches fire tonight,—please save the letter. I cannot die without the sight.

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"In the trial following the "Boston Massacre," John Adams and Miss Quincy's grandfather, Josiah Quincy, Jr., appeared in defence of the British Captain Preston and his soldiers. It is apparently to this trial that Admiral Austen refers in the third paragraph.

"Admiral Austen to Miss Quincy

"Portsdown Lodge

"March 29th 1852

"Dear Madam,

"I have great pleasure in acknowledging the receipt of your letter of the 2nd inst. and desire to assure you of the high gratification the perusal of it afforded me, the members of my family and some intimate friends to whom it has been shown. They were all delighted with the enthusiasm displayed by yourself and friends on the occasion of your receiving my letter with its enclosure, and are satisfied that the autograph of my late sister could not have been placed in any hands where it would have been more highly appreciated.

"I presume we all have vanity. Mine could not but be gratified, perhaps I ought to say flattered, by the warm and complimentary expressions used by your sister in her note. I do not know whether in the character of Capt. Wentworth the authoress meant in any degree to delineate that of her brother. Perhaps she might, but I rather think parts of Capt. Harville's were drawn from myself; at least the description of his domestic habits, tastes and occupations bear a considerable resemblance to mine. Though I had not previously met with the lines you have quoted from Lord Morpeth, yet I find they were well known to some of my children, and having been published in one of the annals are easily procurable. It would therefore be taxing your kindness needlessly to give you the trouble of transcribing them, but my sincere thanks are due for the obliging offer. I have not the honour of Lord Carlisle's acquaintance, but am well aware of the high estimation in which he held my sister's works; as a proof of it, a report has been circulated that on one occasion while absorbed in the perusal of Pride and Prejudice his lordship was summoned to attend a Cabinet Council, but unable or unwilling to lay down the book, he did not reach the Council-chamber in time to escape a sharp rebuke from the minister for his tardiness.

"I feel greatly obliged by the particulars you have communicated relative to your own family. They could not be otherwise than interesting. It is always gratifying to hear of the conduct and acts of public men, which bespeak a noble and generous mind, and doubtless they are never more striking than when exercised in behalf of an enemy in distress. Perhaps you can inform me if there is any published account in existence of the trial to which you have referred, and if so how or where it could be procured. I should much like to see it. I accept with much thankfulness your very kind offer of the panoramic view of Boston, if you can send it without inconvenience. It may be addressed to the care of my son, Henry E. Austen Esqr. Barrister No 7, New Square, Lincoln's Inn.

"Shortly after sending off my former letter I discovered that the manuscript I forwarded with it was written in 1800; the day of the week and month agree therewith.—I was in London last week and showed your letter to a very intimate female friend who had known my sister she mentioned that some years ago she met at the house of a Mrs. Coxe, a young lady of the name of Anna Quincy a native of the U.S.—if your sister was ever in England perhaps she was the person. My friend's maiden name was Cushing, but she married first a Capt. Hore of the navy, and secondly Mr. Bedford, whose widow she now is. I must not omit to thank you for the kind wish of making acquaintance with any of my family who may chance to visit Boston. I am not aware that such an occurrence is at all probable, but should it be so, I feel assured any one of them would be delighted to profit by the very friendly feelings you have evinced towards the name of Austen. I may as well mention two small mistakes you made in the direction of your letter—the first is that my second name is William, tho' I can well believe my signature is as likely to be read M. as W.—the other is that I am not a vice admiral, having for the last 3 years attained the higher rank of admiral. I wish I could believe that in the change of rank I had left every vice behind me.

"I must offer my best respects and good wishes to all your family, and assure you how sincerely I am your obliged and faithful friend and humble Servant

"Francis Wm Austen."

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"The two ensuing letters relate to a visit paid by Miss Quincy's sister, Mrs. Waterston, with her husband and daughter, to Admiral Austen in 1856."

In the midst of our Civil War the correspondence between Admiral Austen and Miss Quincy was resumed. This letter, written as he was approaching ninety, is the last from him that is found in the book of autographs. The allusions to the Prince Consort, the Prince of Wales, and the war between the North and South explain themselves. There can be little doubt that "Mr. Quincy's speech," to which Admiral Austen refers, was the vigorous patriotic address delivered by Josiah Quincy before the Union Club of Boston, on February 29, 1863, when he had just passed his ninety-first birthday. In 1864, he died."

"With the death of Admiral Austen the correspondence with his family did not come to an end. Five years after his death his nephew, the Rev. J. E. Austen Leigh, a nineteenth-century Vicar of Bray, having produced the first edition of his "Memoir" of Jane Austen, and planning for the second, wrote to Miss Quincy, received the copy of the letter of November 12, 1800, to Martha Lloyd which he used in that volume, and expressed his thanks for this piece of co-operation."

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"It remains only to be added that had the Vicar of Bray accepted Miss Quincy's offer of copies of the admiral's letters, the fragments of information and of sidelight upon Miss Austen and her brother which have waited all these years for publication might have become accessible to her host of lovers more than half a century ago."

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September 15, 2021 - September 15, 2021.

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–EXTRAS: Criticism–

THE NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN (1859)

EXCERPT FROM Criticism and Fiction (1891)

THE PERFECTION OF THE NOVEL by William Edward Simonds (1894)

FROM FIELDING TO JANE AUSTEN by Williams James Dawson (1905)

JANE AUSTEN, AND THE NOVEL OF SOCIAL COMEDY by Williams James Dawson (1905)

MISS AUSTEN from the New Monthly Magazine (1852)

JANE AUSTEN by Anna Waterston (1863)

HUNTING FOR SNARKES AT LYME REGIS from Fanny Caroline Lefroy (1879)

IS IT JUST? from Fanny Caroline Lefroy (1883)

A BUNDLE OF LETTERS by Fanny Caroline Lefroy (1883)

MISS AUSTEN'S COUNTRY (1875)

STYLE AND MISS AUSTEN by Mary Augusta Ward (1884)

AN EXCERPT FROM Memoirs of John Murray by Samuel Smiles (1891)

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS by Andrew Lang (1892)

A GIRL'S OPINION ON JANE AUSTEN by Edith Edlmann (1892)

A JANE AUSTEN LETTER by M. A. De Wolfe Howe (1925)

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September 12, 2021 - September 15, 2021.

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Reviews - Books I Read - DRJG

Thursday, September 16, 2021

JANE AUSTEN - Complete Works –EXTRAS: Criticism–, by various authors.

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