Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 17

Here are some of the pictures I took this summer in Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick.

On the ferry to PEI at the end of June, on my way to the L.M. Montgomery Institute conference in Charlottetown and the unveiling of the Project Bookmark Canada plaque honouring Montgomery’s poem “The Gable Window” in Cavendish:

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Wood Islands Lighthouse, PEI

Charlottetown sky

“The Gable Window” Bookmark, Cavendish, PEI

PEI lupines (which always make me think of Barbara Cooney’s book Miss Rumphius: “You must do something to make the world more beautiful.”)

Back in Nova Scotia:

In the garden at the Cole Harbour Heritage Farm, Nova Scotia

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Hiking at Graves Island Provincial Park, Nova Scotia

The view from Graves Island

The Halifax Public Gardens

Government House, Halifax, Nova Scotia

A few photos from a run at Point Pleasant Park in Halifax:

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After I read Charis Cotter’s novel The Painting (Tundra, 2017), part of which takes place at a lighthouse in Newfoundland, I wanted to visit a lighthouse, so I chose one that’s close to home—Peggy’s Cove. From the novel:

I sat on my bed and looked at the painting of Newfoundland on my wall.

It was just as beautiful as ever. The road was so inviting—as if Maisie was saying come in, come here, come into this world and walk along the road to the lighthouse, and you will find something you have always wanted. I realized that that was what it always said to me. It was the promise of a different world, a world of heartbreaking beauty where everything was right and seabirds flew against the sky and the wind blew patterns in the tall grass.

But it wasn’t really that wonderful world. Now I knew how unhappy Claire had been there.

This section is from the perspective of Annie, one of the two heroines. I loved the epigraphs from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, and Claire’s passion for the Bookmobile that visits the remote community where she lives: “I don’t know what I would have done without that Bookmobile…. I never felt better than when I walked home from school with my eight new books weighing down my knapsack, with all that new reading ahead of me.” Claire’s favourite books include Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and novels by L.M. Montgomery (“I wiped away my tears and reached for Emily of New Moon and Anne of Green Gables. I was just about an orphan now, so I might as well read books about orphans.”)

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Peggy’s Cove

Walking along the St. John River, on a short trip to Fredericton, New Brunswick:

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The last few photos are from a day trip with my daughter to River John, Nova Scotia, to visit one of our favourite bookstores, Mabel Murple’s Book Shoppe & Dreamery:

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Here are eight of my favourite blog posts, to mark the eighth anniversary of my blog:

Jane Austen’s “Darling Child” Meets the World: on the publication of Pride and Prejudice in 1813.

Why is Mr. Darcy So Attractive? (in the novel, not the movies).

Mansfield Park is a Tragedy, Not a Comedy: on the tragic action of Austen’s Mansfield Park.

Austens in Bermuda and Nova Scotia: photos of places Jane Austen’s brothers Charles and Francis Austen and their families visited during their time on the North American Station of the British Royal Navy.

Admiralty House, where Francis Austen and his family stayed when they were in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1840s

What Edith Wharton Tells Us About the Way We Live Now: on The Custom of the Country.

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Spring in Rainbow Valley: on L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valley, with photos from a trip to Prince Edward Island.

“The Lake of Shining Waters.”

Malpeque, PEI

“She knew that a hard struggle was before her”: Emily’s Quest: “After this I’m just going to write what I want to,” says L.M. Montgomery’s heroine Emily Starr.

PEI National Park, Cavendish

The Republic of Love Bookmark and the Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth: “Think instead of the stories you like to read, or better yet, the story you would like to read but can’t find.” – Carol Shields

The Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth, Winnipeg, Manitoba

I can’t begin to choose favourites from among the many posts other writers have contributed to the three blog series I’ve hosted, so I’ll include all of them:

An Invitation to Mansfield Park: Guest posts in honour of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (2014).

Emma in the Snow: Guest posts in honour of the 200th anniversary of Austen’s Emma (2015-16).

Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: the blog series that began last fall and ended a few weeks ago. Guest posts on the two novels that were published together after Austen’s death in 1817.

Many thanks to everyone who’s read and commented and contributed guest posts over the past eight years!

Deborah Yaffe read Pride and Prejudice when she was ten and she’s been a passionate Jane Austen fan ever since. She joined the Jane Austen Society of North America when she was sixteen and she reports that she has an impressive collection of Austen-themed coffee mugs, bookmarks, tote bags, and DVDs. She spent thirteen years as a newspaper reporter in New Jersey and California, and her award-winning first book, Other People’s Children: The Battle for Equality in New Jersey’s Schools, tells the story of the state’s efforts to provide equal educational opportunities to rich and poor schoolchildren.

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Deborah holds degrees from Yale University and Oxford University, and she lives in Central New Jersey with her husband, her two children, and her Jane Austen Action Figure. You can find her online at her blog, www.deborahyaffe.com, on Twitter (@DeborahYaffe), and on the Facebook page for her book Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom.

When I hosted a celebration of Mansfield Park in 2014, Deborah wrote a guest post called “The Fatal Mistake,” and for my blog series “Emma in the Snow,” she wrote about “Emma the Imaginist.” I’m very happy that she’s written a guest post on Captain Wentworth’s famous letter for “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion .” Welcome back, Deborah!

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“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think and plan.—Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes?—I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others.—Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in

F.W.

“I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father’s house this evening, or never.”

(Persuasion, Volume 2, Chapter 11)

“How was the truth to reach him?” Anne Elliot wonders towards the end of Persuasion, as she realizes that her true love, Captain Wentworth, is jealous of her relationship with her cousin, Mr. Elliot. “How, in all the peculiar disadvantages of their respective situations, would he ever learn her real sentiments?” (Volume 2, Chapter 8)

Anne’s romantic dilemma—how to bridge the distance between herself and the man she loves—mirrors Jane Austen’s artistic problem in the closing chapters of her last completed novel. Her hero and heroine are not family, like Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley; they are not even friends, like Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney. Eight years after their broken engagement, they are at best acquaintances, part of the same neighborhood social circle. In the course of the novel, they have barely spoken to each other, and never in private. How will these two ever communicate freely enough to clear up the misunderstandings that divide them?

We know Austen struggled with this plot problem, since her first attempt at solving it has survived, in the so-called “cancelled chapters” of Persuasion, the only extant rough draft of any part of her finished books. The cancelled chapters—which cast Admiral and Mrs. Croft as heavy-handed matchmakers, the dei ex machina who maneuver Anne and Wentworth into a decisive conversation—provide a clumsy and implausible resolution; no wonder Austen herself found the work “tame and flat,” as her nephew tells us in his Memoir, and went to bed nursing that depressed feeling of failure so familiar to all writers (J.E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, ed. Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford University Press [2002]).

But the alternative that came to her upon waking was nothing short of brilliant, and the scene she eventually wrote, which culminates in Anne’s reading of Captain Wentworth’s letter, is one of her greatest. It’s a clever and elegant solution to her plot problem and a tour de force of technique: In one of the greatest love scenes in all of English literature, the two protagonists never exchange a word, communicating entirely through stolen glances, overheard conversations, and, finally, an impassioned written declaration.

Wentworth’s letter—so beloved among Janeites that it is known simply as The Letter—is unusual in Austen’s work: deeply, satisfyingly romantic in a way that her happy endings seldom are. (Compare Edward Ferrars’ proposal to Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility: “In what manner he expressed himself, and how he was received, need not be particularly told” [Volume 3, Chapter 13]). While swooning, however, we should not overlook the consummate artistry with which Austen creates her effects, at the levels of plot, character, language, and theme.

First, note how perfectly Austen’s solution to her plot problem fits the relationship she has established between her two protagonists. Although they seldom speak—their first conversation of any substance occurs in the Octagon Room at Bath, three-quarters of the way through the novel—Anne and Wentworth are exquisitely tuned in to each other’s frequencies, picking up what less perceptive observers miss: He notices her exhaustion on the walk back from Winthrop, she correctly reads his lack of real romantic interest in the Musgrove sisters. From the beginning, their communication is non-verbal, or pre-verbal; how appropriate that it should remain so almost until the end—until one of them “can listen no longer in silence.”

Once that silence is broken, notice how true the letter’s style is to the personality of the man who writes it. Like so many of Austen’s most sympathetic male characters, Wentworth is decisive and direct; he does not ramble or dither. With its choppy rhythms (of the 23 sentences in the letter, 12 are less than 10 words long, and only three run to more than 20) and its simple, declarative vocabulary (only 14 of its 260 words contain more than two syllables), the letter is eminently believable as the work of just such a person operating under the influence of intense emotion. As he pours out the feelings he has bottled up for years, Wentworth doesn’t have the time or inclination for carefully balanced clauses and flowery turns of phrase.

And yet this passage, supposedly written on the fly by a man with no time for reflection, is structured with great care. Austen pulls off the near-miraculous trick of building a convincing illusion of spontaneous emotional expression on a foundation of conscious, deliberate artistic choices that recapitulate and deepen the novel’s themes.

Because we know we’re reading a declaration of love, it’s easy on a first reading, or even a fourth or fifth, to miss how dark the first part of the letter is. Wentworth begins with a painful, even violent metaphor (“You pierce my soul”). In the lines that follow, he speaks of agony and heartbreak. He condemns himself as weak, resentful, and possibly unjust. Repeatedly, he evokes the alternative way this story might end: the chance that he is too late, that Anne’s feelings may have changed, that love can die. As he writes, he in effect re-experiences the anguish of their parting and of the self-doubt and estrangement that followed.

If the first part of the letter is all about their past, the next section will leave that sad history behind. And what are the words that, on the page, provide the bridge from the remembrance of past pain to the possibility of new happiness? They are “never inconstant”—words that also name the fact about the Anne-Wentworth relationship that makes such bridging possible.

In the second part of the letter, we are no longer trapped in the painful past; we have moved into the present—their recent meetings in Bath—and almost immediately into real time, as Wentworth reports his sensations and reactions (“I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me”) as he listens to Anne’s conversation with Captain Harville. Indeed, Wentworth is listening so carefully that he even echoes one of Anne’s phrases from that conversation—“true attachment and constancy.” He comes into perfect unison with her on the very words that explain why such unison between them remains possible.

Just as the body of the letter moves from past to present, so in his postscript, Wentworth projects his relationship with Anne into the (near) future: “this evening,” when he will—or won’t—cross the threshold of “[her] father’s house,” literally and symbolically bridging the distance between Anne’s past life as a daughter and her future life as a wife. In essence, then, Wentworth’s letter retells in miniature the history of his relationship with Anne, moving from past grief to present understanding to future union, across the bridge of constant attachment.

Impassioned and moving, the letter deserves its reputation for romantic sublimity, but it is not a simple outpouring of endearments. It is something more mature and nuanced. It bears witness to life’s contingency, acknowledges past failure, and embodies a commitment to trying again anyway. In the letter, and in the conversations that follow, Anne and Wentworth do not deny the pain they have caused each other; they accept it, move through it, and integrate it into the happier future they plan together. Through Wentworth’s letter—an elegant plot device and an effective tool of character development, couched in carefully chosen language and perfectly calculated to put a lump in the reader’s throat—Austen returns us to Persuasion’s central themes: that love is fragile, but also enduring; that grief and pain are real, but so is hope.

Quotations are from the Penguin Classics editions of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, included in Jane Austen: The Complete Novels, with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler (2006).

“Placed it before Anne.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)

This is the thirty-third and last post in the series—thank you very much to all the contributors, and to everyone who read and shared and commented on their work. If you missed any of these guest posts and you’d like to catch up, you can find all the contributions listed here. Happy 200th anniversary to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion!

Many years ago, when I taught my very first English literature class and I put Pride and Prejudice on the syllabus, I was absolutely delighted to discover a collection of essays called Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. This wonderful book was exactly what I needed—I had just completed an MA thesis on medieval poetry and I didn’t know Austen’s novels very well. I learned a great deal from the book about how to introduce my students to Jane Austen’s world and to the pleasures of looking at the novel from a variety of different perspectives. (That year I also learned, partly through the experience of teaching Pride and Prejudice, that I wanted to apply to PhD programs so I could study Austen’s work in more detail.)

One of the essays in the collection was particularly helpful in showing how the way Elizabeth Bennet interprets the view from Pemberley can help us to understand the novel itself: as she moves from room to room and looks out the windows, it seems as if the objects she sees are “taking different positions”—but of course it’s Elizabeth who is “taking different positions,” which demonstrates “one of the novel’s central insights: that perceptions from fixed vantage points must be corrected by movement through space, as first impressions must be corrected by movement through time.”  You can imagine what a pleasure it was when I met the editor of the book, and the author of that essay, Marcia McClintock Folsom, a couple of years later at my first JASNA AGM, in Colorado Springs, and how happy I have been to continue to learn from Marcia’s essays and AGM presentations, and from conversations with her about Austen’s novels.

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Marcia McClintock Folsom is Professor Emeritus of Literature at Wheelock College. She’s the editor of Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Emma as well as Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and with co-editor John Wiltshire, Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park, and Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Persuasion (forthcoming). Her essay “Emma: Knowing Her Mind” was published in Persuasions 38 (2017), and her analysis of “Power in Mansfield Park: Austen’s Study of Domination and Resistance” appeared in Persuasions 34 (2013). I’m very happy to introduce her contribution to “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”

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Readers have a lot of specific history about Jane Austen’s writing of Persuasion. Thanks to the note written by her sister Cassandra on the dates of composition of the novels, we know that Jane Austen began Persuasion on August 8th, 1815 and completed it on August 6th, 1816 (Minor Works, ed. Chapman, Volume 6). Readers also have the surprising added luck of the existence of a 32-page manuscript of two last chapters that Austen decided not to use as the novel’s conclusion. This manuscript, written on both sides of 16 small pieces of paper, is the only manuscript known to exist of any part of any of her published novels. That extraordinary discovery deepens our knowledge of Austen’s process and of the difficulties she experienced in writing the end of Persuasion.

August 8th, 1815, was just seven weeks after the battle of Waterloo, which ended the more than two decades of war between Britain and France. Napoleon, the French commander-in-chief, had actually resigned more than a year earlier than that battle, on April 5th, 1814, and had been sent to exile on the Isle of Elba near Italy. In March of 1815, he had escaped, and gathering an army of supporters, he had resumed the war. What followed was later called the “One Hundred Days” of new fighting, until Napoleon was decisively defeated at Waterloo, by combined British and Prussian troops. As Brian Southam points out in Jane Austen and the Navy, the day that Austen began writing Persuasion, August 8th, 1815, was the day the British newspapers announced that “Bonaparte has sailed,” exiled again, this time to St. Helena, a much more distant island in the South Atlantic, 1,200 miles off the coast of southern Africa. The time span of the novel, from “the summer of 1814” to the middle of February 1815, corresponds to the last half of Napoleon’s first exile, and the novel’s happy ending occurs before what all of Austen’s first readers would have known, that this lull in the war ended in March, fighting resumed on land, and required an immense military effort finally to defeat the French army, on June 18th, 1815, at Waterloo. Southam argues that one of Austen’s purposes in this novel was to celebrate the navy, since it had declined in prestige after the truce with the American navy in December of 1815, and since the Waterloo victory had been achieved by the army, not the navy.

The novel Austen began on the date of the beginning of Napoleon’s second exile, August 8th, 1815, is the most precisely dated of any of her novels, beginning, as she wrote, “at this present time” in “the summer of 1814” (Volume 1, Chapter 1). That summer during Napoleon’s first exile was when naval officers (still on half-pay) came home, rejoining British society, and looking for houses to rent and wives to marry. Modern editions of Persuasion often contain chronologies of the novel, usually beginning, as the novel does, with Sir Walter Elliot’s birthdate, mentioning marriages, other birthdates, and events that occur before the novel’s present, and then slowing down to trace the action month by month, week by week, and even day by day, as Austen places the novel’s present events in clear sequence through the late summer, fall and early winter of 1814 in Volume I, and December, January, and early February of 1815 in Volume II.

Austen’s own locations in the year that she was writing Persuasion are traced by John Halperin (The Life of Jane Austen). She was at Chawton in August when she began writing it, and then in early October, she moved with her brother Henry to London in order to negotiate with John Murray about the publication of Emma. She stayed longer than she had expected because Henry became seriously ill, and Jane stayed on to take care of him. At the end of October, she wrote to Cassandra that she alternated between nursing Henry and “working and writing” in a back room. By this time her family was growing worried about her health, too. Henry gradually improved, and he was well enough for Jane to return to Chawton near the end of December. There she stayed, hosting frequent family visitors in April, May, and June, still working on the novel, but taking a trip with Cassandra in May to the spa at Cheltenham to try the supposedly medicinal waters in hopes of curing whatever was the matter with her. Among the visitors to Chawton that summer was Jane’s eighteen-year-old nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, who later wrote the “Memoir” of his aunt, which tells a story of her writing the first and second versions of novel’s ending during July and August of 1816.

The manuscript of the so-called cancelled chapters of Persuasion offers more details about the dates of Austen’s writing. The first manuscript page, marked “Chap. 10,” has the date “July 8.” The manuscript of “Chapter 11,” ends with the word “FINIS” and the date of “July 18. – 1816.” This date is exactly one year before Jane Austen died. The many cross-outs and emendations, especially in the second chapter, suggest Austen’s struggle in the ten days she spent writing these chapters, as does an earlier “FINIS” she apparently wrote on July 16th. Her revision completed, Austen-Leigh recorded that “her performance did not satisfy her. She thought it tame and flat, and was desirous of producing something better. This weighed upon her mind, the more so probably on account of the weak state of her health; so that one night she retired to rest in very low spirits . . . The next morning she awoke to more cheerful views and brighter inspirations; the sense of power revived; and imagination resumed its course” (A Memoir of Jane Austen). These dates mean that Austen wrote a new Chapter X, and a new Chapter XI with the brilliant scene at the White Hart Inn, and revised and recopied her old Chapter 11, which became the new Chapter XII, in just nineteen days.

Modern editions of the novel frequently include a transcript of the so-called cancelled chapters, sometimes with a photograph of page 1 as a sample to demonstrate the problems of deciphering Austen’s handwriting and her corrections. The two chapters contain a somewhat confusing narrative, presenting a meeting of Anne and Wentworth in the Bath apartment of Crofts, where Wentworth has been set up by Admiral Croft to ask Anne if it’s true that she will marry Mr. Elliot, and if so, the Crofts will leave Kellynch so Anne and Elliot can live there. The scene is painfully awkward for both Anne and Wentworth, and Anne, who is seated, can only reply hesitatingly, and the lovers’ understanding is achieved “in a silent, but very powerful Dialogue.”

The manuscript pages of these two chapters reveal a writer resolutely striving to figure out how to end the novel, and clearly frustrated with her efforts. Scholars, starting with R. W. Chapman, and including Arthur M. Axelrad, have studied the agonizingly corrected handwritten pages found in Cassandra’s desk. Most brilliantly, Jocelyn Harris, in her meticulous reconstruction of Austen’s struggles in writing Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 of the manuscript, sorts out hundreds of choices of diction, sequencing in sentences, as well as the implied writing process and probable intention about motives in Austen’s revision of those two chapters, and the creation of the new Chapters X, XI, and XII of the novel as it was published on December 20, 1817 (A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression, 2007). Harris devotes all of her Chapter 2, “The Reviser at Work,” to an analysis of “MS Chapter 10 to Chapters X-XI (1818),” and all of her Chapter 3 to “At the White Hart: MS Chapter 11 to Chapter XII (1818).” (As Austen did, Harris uses Arabic numbers for the manuscript chapters, and Roman numerals for the published 1818 chapters.)

Setting Virginia Woolf’s comments on Austen’s writing at the beginning of her study of these remarkable pages, Harris notes that Woolf looked with a “writer’s eye” on Austen’s early fragment, “The Watsons,” and found what Austen’s finished writing rarely betrays: “pages of preliminary drudgery” that Jane Austen must have “forced her pen to go through” to change a first draft into a polished work. In studying these astonishingly hard-to-read manuscript pages, Harris actually figures out what Woolf predicted, the “suppressions and insertions and artful devices” by which Austen tried to revise her own writing. As Harris vividly documents in her book: “Jane Austen is her own best and most ruthless critic when she reworks Chapter 10 of her manuscript into Chapters X-XI of the version published in 1818.” Noting Henry James’ grudging praise of Austen’s “light felicity,” and her (to him) apparently effortless and unconscious way of writing, Harris responds vigorously: “if James could have known how hard Jane Austen worked over her manuscript, he might have acknowledged a fellow professional. The revised manuscript of Persuasion reveals no warbling thrush, no wool-gatherer, but an extraordinarily self-critical, self-conscious, and meticulous writer and rewriter.”

Harris’s book magnificently uncovers the hidden meanings of Austen’s subtle, painstaking, multiple revisions of words, sentences, and sequences in the manuscript chapters, and then her drastic rejection and cutting of all that work. Bringing a much enlarged cast to Chapter X, Austen then creates in Chapter XI the infinitely more successful scene of the lovers coming together at the White Hart Inn. Reversing their positions in the cancelled chapter, Anne is standing with Captain Harville and Wentworth is seated. Anne here speaks at length, with tact and kindness to Harville, as she ardently describes the power of a woman’s passion, even “when existence or when hope is gone.” Wentworth’s letter in response to what he partially overhears is the most passionate declaration of love in any Austen novel.

As James Edward Austen-Leigh wrote about those chapters, “Perhaps it may be thought that she has seldom written anything more brilliant.” More extravagantly, Austen’s early 20th century critic Reginald Farrer wrote in 1917, the bicentennial of Austen’s death: “that culminating little heartbreaking scene between Harville and Anne (quite apart from the amazing technical skill of its contrivance) towers to such poignancy of beauty that it takes rank . . . as one of the very sacred things of literature the one dares not trust oneself to read aloud” (Littlewood, Volume 2).  Without indulging in such rapture, many readers would say—and I would agree with them—that the last three chapters of Persuasion really are among the most brilliant pages Austen ever wrote. Studying Austen’s writing process, as Harris unfolds it in her book, enables readers to fathom even more completely the “amazing technical skill” of the final chapters of Jane Austen’s last completed novel.

Quotations are from the Cambridge edition of Persuasion, edited by Janet Todd and Antje Blank (2006).

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Thirty-second in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: Deborah Yaffe’s guest post on Captain Wentworth’s letter. I can’t quite believe the series is almost over…. Thank you to everyone who’s been following along!

Today’s guest post is by Judith Sears, a freelance writer specializing in marketing and corporate communications. A few of her short plays have been given staged readings in the Denver, Colorado area. She says she’s a lifelong Jane Austen fan, and she’s made two pilgrimages to Bath. When she was rereading the ending of Persuasion, she tells me, “Elizabeth Elliot tapped me on the shoulder and wouldn’t stop talking until I wrote it down.” She sent me the story she wrote about Elizabeth’s vulnerability as a single woman, and I’m happy to share it here, along with her guest post on the cancelled chapters of Persuasion.

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Jane Austen At Work: The Revision of Persuasion’s Ending

The original draft of the last two chapters of Persuasion is the only part of a manuscript that we have of a novel that Austen subsequently revised and intended to publish.

In his Memoir of Jane Austen, Austen’s nephew J.E. Austen-Leigh writes that she finished the novel in July, 1816, but was dissatisfied with the ending: “She thought it tame and flat, and was desirous of producing something better.” In her revision, Austen expanded Chapter 10 of Volume 2 into two chapters and turned the original Chapter 11 (with some editing and punctuation changes) into Chapter 12 of the finished novel (or Chapters 22, 23, and 24 in a single volume version).

While Jane Austen could hardly write anything “flat,” there is wide critical agreement that the revision is greatly superior to the original draft. The revision develops the novel’s ending much more fully, adding events and pulling in more characters.

In this post, I’ll focus on the simple fact that most of the main characters make an appearance in the revision, whereas in the original draft only Anne, Wentworth and the Crofts, mostly offstage, are involved.

(If you haven’t read the original ending, you can find it online at Mollands.net. You can see a facsimile of the original manuscript here: Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts: Two Chapters of Persuasion.)

The chapters in question tell the climactic events that determine whether Anne and Wentworth will be reunited. The first draft acts as if Anne and Wentworth are all that matters. Their reunion is accomplished in one chapter (Chapter 10/22) with one main scene that takes place immediately after Anne has left Mrs. Smith. The reconciliation scene with Wentworth isn’t “flat.” It’s tender and rather dramatic. But, it’s an awfully quick and easy resolution to an eight and a half year problem.

And, really, in what Jane Austen world does a couple’s union involve only them? Granted, Anne and Wentworth are now more mature, and with “one independent fortune between them” they can’t be stopped, as the narrator acknowledges in both versions (original Chapter 11/23; revised Chapter 12/24). But, that’s not the whole story.

Austen knew this and her revision expands the time frame for reconciliation to two days and involves most of the main characters. A flurry of events—the arrival of the Musgroves, visits, invitations, theatre plans, the sighting of Mrs. Clay and William Elliot—twist and twirl the action towards Wentworth’s decision to declare himself in a letter.

It’s like a lively, complicated country dance and it deeply embeds Anne and Wentworth in the social world of Persuasion. They must interact with multiple personalities and influences, instead of acting as two independent wills.

As to that social world—it’s primarily a contest between the Musgroves, spontaneous and warm, and the Elliots, callous and calculating. The Elliots’ entrance to the White Hart, where the Musgroves are staying, produces a “general chill,” just as their exit produces “ease and animation” (Chapter 11/22). Prior to this, the Musgroves have been a picture of genial confusion, and later, in Chapter 12/23, talkative, open-hearted Mrs. Musgrove’s burbling about Henrietta’s engagement produces a “conscious glance” from Wentworth.

All of the important action of the revised two chapters takes place within the Musgrove circle. This and the contrast in family atmospheres suggests that warmth, informality, and the simple affection of the Musgroves are essential for Wentworth and Anne to be able to find each other. It’s not enough for Anne and Wentworth to be more mature and have one independent fortune, although they are and do. Nevertheless, the sterile Elliot household will always hamper healthy growth, whereas the Musgroves support it.

“Placed it before Anne,” by Hugh Thomson (Wikimedia)

As an aside, if this is Austen’s point, may we not raise an eyebrow when she gently ridicules Mrs. Musgrove’s “powerful whisper” which delivers “minutiae” (Chapter 12/23) when, in the next minute, she will make all of Anne’s happiness hang on Wentworth overhearing her conversation? (It must be admitted, however, that Austen certainly knows that openness and spontaneity can have advantages and disadvantages and the Musgroves are never presented as powerhouses of discernment.)

Incorporating more characters with more schemes inevitably puts more obstacles in Anne and Wentworth’s path—and this is another improvement of the revision. The convenient offices of Admiral Croft in the first draft are too convenient and force the moment on Wentworth and Anne.

In the revised chapters, both Anne and Wentworth must act and demonstrate their ability to successfully navigate the society that thwarted them nine years earlier.

For example, the revised chapters highlight the rumors about Anne and William Elliot, providing more fodder for Wentworth’s jealousy and worry that Anne may once again be persuaded to give way to familial ambitions. In a delicate social setting, Anne must act to downplay a possible link between herself and Mr. Elliot.

Elizabeth Elliot introduces a complementary obstacle: her insulting invitation to Wentworth raises Anne’s concerns that her family’s heartless snobbery will repel Wentworth. All of these complications, of course, also build suspense, which was short-circuited in the original.

It is interesting that there is one obstacle and one major character that does not appear in the revised chapters: Lady Russell. Lady Russell, who first persuaded Anne to break the engagement with Wentworth, isn’t even a bystander. Anne, whom Lady Russell consulted about budgetary reforms at Kellynch Hall, doesn’t even think about asking Lady Russell’s advice this time around and doesn’t prioritize telling her what she’s learned about Mr. William Elliot.

Lady Russell, who values Anne as the Musgroves do, but values rank, as the Elliots do, is simply presented with a fait accompli in the final chapter in both the first and revised versions. Anne now has the life experience to trust her own judgment and to trust Wentworth’s talents and character.

Anne and Wentworth’s “little history of sorrowful interest” was first introduced in six paragraphs in Volume 1, Chapter 4. The revised chapters recapitulate that history, showing us scene by scene how the second time around, Anne and Wentworth, “more tender, more tried . . . more equal to act, more justified in acting,” achieve their happy ending.

Quotations from Persuasion are from the Norton Critical Edition (second edition), edited and with a preface by Patricia Meyer Spacks (2013). The quotation from Austen-Leigh’s Memoir is from the Penguin edition of Persuasion, edited and with an introduction by D. W. Harding (1965).

“With eyes of glowing entreaty fixed on her,” by C.E. Brock (Mollands.net)

Elizabeth’s Epilogue

“It would be well for the eldest sister if she were equally satisfied with her situation…”

– Jane Austen, Persuasion, Chapter 24

Dear Mary,

You think you have problems! Whilst you fret about your health—and, candidly, I advise you to take Mr. Robinson’s advice and cut back on the laudanum; if you’re going to complain about your health, at least do what the apothecary tells you!—I am dealing with some truly desperate developments. The Elliot name and estate are in dire jeopardy. And, before I forget, Father has been stricken, leaving me to cope with everything, and the physician urges you and Charles to come to Bath right away.

Shortly after the announcement of Anne’s engagement to Captain What’s-his-worth, Mr. William Elliot stopped calling, which was nothing, as I told everyone, but no sooner had he left Bath than this baggage—she has no surname of dignity, you know—that I had brought to Bath and introduced into the highest society told me that she was needed at home.

I begged her to stay, as the constant praise of Anne was getting oppressive. It was tiresome, having my friends, those few true ones who are left, congratulate me about my sister’s good fortune and her supposed second bloom. Then the gabsters would rave on about her Captain and what an eligible catch he was and ask me, me, if I was jealous.

The very idea. I snapped my fan shut quite sharply and stared down the chit that had the nerve to say that to my face, let me assure you. (It was the fan you admired with the pastoral drawing, trimmed in lace, quite sets off my eyes, so Mrs. Wallis tells me.) Elizabeth Elliot … jealous!

But that was all just annoying. Brace yourself, Mary, because the woman-who-has-no-surname-of-dignity left Bath and has since turned up in a London establishment under the protection of our cousin and the Kellynch heir, Mr. William Elliot.

For the last few months with one hand she fed me sweet lies that Mr. Elliot had intentions toward me—I hope you don’t think I’m such a simpleton as to fall for that, of course not!—whilst the other hand was caressing him.

The gorge rises in me as I write.

Fortunately, Lady Russell came running to tell us the news when it first broke. It was a trial listening to her everlasting concern for our family name until I sat up very straight and reminded her how pleased she’d been that the heir had reconciled with our father. The confused look on her face as she sipped her tea was my only satisfaction in this all-around dissatisfying turn of events.

At least Father and I had the opportunity to compose ourselves before putting in our appearance at the Pump room. How the fans flipped open and the heads bent toward each other to whisper when we entered! To be grist for the on dit of a bunch of frivolous Bath chits was galling, but we carried it off with heads held high.

The next morning, Father and I went immediately to wait on our cousins, the Dalrymples, to shore up our most distinguished connection.

Ominously, both Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret were indisposed. We left our cards. Later, at a café, Mrs. Wallis came by to “do me the favor” of telling me the Dalrymples are not pleased that it’s known that they received the woman-with-no-surname-of-dignity on our behalf.

Upon returning home, Father wrote a note to Lady D., explaining our shock and how awfully we were used. Just as he concluded the note, he suffered a terrible tightening in his chest and collapsed. He has not risen from his bed these three days. The doctor told me to summon the family, which is why I write, and prepare for the worst.

The worst? If Father dies while still in debt, I will be dependent on Mr. Elliot to ensure that the estate pays my dowry. Of course, he has the money, but only imagine the many difficulties and delays, such a conniving blackguard might introduce just to amuse himself.

And, suppose Mr. Elliot marries that wanton? If she has convinced him thus far, what else may she convince him of?

Just imagine it! That bounder and his convenient descending on Kellynch Hall as heirs! The woman who used to be beholden to my favor, my notice, now holding my place? Opening every ball as I have done for nigh on fourteen years? Entertaining as Lady Elliot? Freckled Lady Elliot!

It is not to be borne.

If I am not married, where will I go? I cannot be beholden to those two and the only thing worse than facing her condescension would be being the object of her charity. Unendurable.

But, it occurs to me that I must apply to Anne. I fancy she didn’t care much for the woman-with-no-surname-of-dignity. I shall remind her of my role in bringing Captain Who’sits into our circle. Without my having established the Elliot’s as the fashionable place to be in Bath, do you think he would have bothered with or noticed Anne?

Yes, I shall drop a few hints and I am sure she will be quick to recognize what she owes me. Perhaps the Captain has some unattached friends that would be grateful for an introduction to an heiress of noble name. A widower Admiral would be fine, although if he were very, very wealthy—much more than Anne’s Captain—I would deign to accept a Captain. And, unlike our father, I am quite liberal on the subject of appearance. The fortune will do.

I must close now and get to the Pump Room—more important than ever to see and be seen. Lady R. can sit with Father. You and Charles should hurry to Bath as Father may not last. By the bye, I’ve fired that fraud, Mr. Shepherd, and hired someone else to attend to our financial affairs, for how could we trust the father of such a strumpet? And that’s what I shall say to his face! Something to look forward to.

Anxiously,

E.

Here’s a photo from one of Judith’s trips to Bath, of the street where the last scene in the 1995 adaptation of Persuasion was filmed.

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Thirty-first in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Marcia McClintock Folsom and Deborah Yaffe.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Sheila Johnson Kindred is the author of the first biography of Fanny Palmer Austen, Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen (McGill-Queen’s, 2017), which recently received the John Lyman Book Award for Naval and Maritime Biography and Autobiography.

Regular readers of the blog may remember that Sheila and I have collaborated on several projects over the years, including a paper for the Jane Austen Society conference in Halifax last June, on “Charles and Francis: Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers on the Royal Navy’s North American Station,” and a joint presentation at the JASNA AGM 2014, entitled “Among the Proto-Janeites: Reading Mansfield Park for Consolation in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1815” (published in Persuasions On-Line). We also created a walking tour of Austen-related sites in Halifax, which you can download here.

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Sheila has done extensive original research on the life of Jane Austen’s naval brother Charles and his wife, Fanny, and she has written about the connections between their experiences and Austen’s naval novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Her essays have been published in Persuasions, The Jane Austen Society Report, and the Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, and in Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, a collection of essays I edited for the Jane Austen Society. She taught for many years in the Philosophy Department at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, and she has spoken at Jane Austen Society of North America AGMs in Quebec City, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, NY, and Washington DC, at the JASNA Chicago Region Spring Gala 2018, and at the Jane Austen Society (UK) conferences in Halifax (2005 and 2017) and Bermuda (2010). She lives in Halifax with her husband and their cat. I’m very happy to introduce her guest post for “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”

Naval officers’ wives during the Napoleonic Wars have long fascinated me—both the real-life ones and those found in fiction, such as in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. While researching the life of Fanny Palmer Austen, I came upon the story of Louisa Berkeley, who married a naval officer in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the same year Fanny Palmer married Charles, Jane’s younger naval brother, in Bermuda. Comparing Louisa’s actions as a naval wife with Fanny’s gave me insights into the significance of Fanny’s relationship with Charles within the naval world they shared. In the process, I discovered how aspects of Fanny’s married life found echos in Austen’s imagining of Sophy, wife of Admiral Croft, in Persuasion. Here are profiles of the diverging and diverting sea going lives of Louisa and Fanny that afforded me a greater understanding of the character of Sophy Croft in Persuasion.

Louisa Berkeley was the eldest daughter of Admiral Sir George Cranfield Berkeley, Charles Austen’s commander-in-chief on the North American Station of the navy, 1806-08. Fanny may even have met the vivacious Louisa, and her sisters, for Sir George brought his family out with him to the North American Station. After a whirlwind courtship in Halifax, Louisa married Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy in St. Paul’s Church on 16 November 1807. Hardy had been Admiral Nelson’s close friend, and captain of his flag ship, HMS Victory, at the Battle of Trafalgar, and had recently been made a baronet, accomplishments which presumably contributed to his attractiveness as a suitor. One wonders if Louisa had any clear idea of what life as a naval wife might entail. She was soon to find out.

Lady Louisa Hardy

After the wedding, Sir Thomas was immediately sent to the Chesapeake Bay area, off the coast of Virginia, where the British navy was determined to contain French war ships already shut up in the Bay. According to a disgruntled Louisa, writing from aboard Hardy’s warship, the 74 gun Triumph, “we spent from December 1807 to April 1808 in the gloomy, desolate [Chesapeake] Bay not allowed to land as the Americans were in such an exasperated state that they might have been disagreeable” (quoted in Nelson’s Hardy and his Wife 1769-1877, by John Gore [1935]). During the whole winter the ship was kept perpetually ready for action and no fires were allowed. In these frigid and far from romantic circumstances, Louisa became pregnant with her first of three daughters. She had no regrets when “at last we were released and I returned to Bermuda where my family were, and soon after . . . [on the Triumph], we returned to England.”

It must have become very soon apparent to Louisa that sharing a naval life with Hardy would have limited attractions for her. They were mismatched in matters of personality and interests. He was a serious, unromantic and uncharismatic 38-year-old, wedded to his career in the navy, whereas she was nineteen, socially ambitious, and fun loving. She scarcely knew Hardy when she married him and their first months together on the Triumph, as she describes them, must have reduced any feelings of “fine naval fervour” that she might have originally felt. She found that she hated to be at sea and very early decided she was uninterested in her husband’s career. In subsequent years she often lived abroad with their three daughters, cultivated the friendship of foreign aristocrats and pursued a life of amusement and entertainment, unconcerned that Hardy was regularly posted on assignments at sea taking him far from England. Louisa was essentially a naval wife in name only.

Fanny held very different views and attitudes about her role as a naval wife. She had the advantage of getting well acquainted with Charles during the two years before they married. She knew him to be kind, caring, charming, entertaining, and very handsome. Beginning with their earliest days together, Fanny saw herself as Charles’s helpmate and supporter. As she lived in Bermuda, the southern base of the North American Station, she understood what the career of a serving naval officer entailed, and she willingly became a participant in naval life. She travelled with Charles on board his vessel the eighteen gun Indian between Bermuda and Halifax on a number of occasions. She experienced at least one horrific storm at sea, but this did not discourage her from sailing with him, including undertaking a North Atlantic crossing to England in 1811. She was attuned to the social role which she was expected to fulfill as flag captain’s wife in Halifax in the summer of 1810 and again during 1812-14 in England, when Charles was flag captain on the 74 gun HMS Namur, which was stationed at the Nore. During this later period, Fanny courageously accepted the challenge of making a home for their family of three daughters on board the Namur.

Some of Fanny’s naval experiences would have been known within the Austen family, and especially by Jane and Cassandra. Fanny had originally been introduced through correspondence within the Austen family and once she was in England, she and Charles paid regular visits to Chawton Cottage, where Jane and Cassandra periodically cared for their children. On one occasion when Fanny and Jane were both guests at Godmersham Park, the estate of Charles’s brother, Edward, Jane wrote to Cassandra, speaking of Fanny in familiar terms. She refers to her as “Mrs Fanny, “Fanny Senior,” “[Cassy’s] Mama”, and part of “the Charleses” (15 and 26 October 1813). She notes that Fanny appears “just like [her] own nice self,” words which suggest Jane had a warm and affectionate attitude towards Fanny. Contacts such as these allowed Jane Austen to learn about Fanny’s unique and diverse involvement as an officer’s wife in a naval world. Crucially, Fanny was able to articulate the complexities of naval life from a female point of view.

Charles Austen, by Robert Field

Jane’s evident sensitivities to Fanny’s life as a naval wife likely influenced her creation of Sophy Croft in Persuasion. Certainly, there are some key differences between Fanny and Sophy in terms of age and appearance, perceptions of what counts as “comfortable” living on a war ship, and the absence of children to care for and nurture. However, there are striking similarities between the two women in terms of behaviour, attitudes and practical common sense.

Both woman made voyages with their husbands. Fanny sailed with Charles between the bases on the North American station and she travelled to England with him on his frigate Cleopatra in 1811. Sophy crossed the Atlantic four times and accompanied Admiral Croft on many other voyages as well. Additionally, Sophy was familiar with Bermuda, a clue that she has been with Admiral Croft on the North American Station, just as Fanny had been with Charles. Fanny periodically lived on four of Charles’s vessels; Sophy made her home on five of her husband’s ships. Both women staved off periods of sea sickness when under sail.

Both Fanny Austen and Sophy Croft were most content when sharing their husband’s lives. Fanny’s letters speak of her very great pleasure in being in Charles’s company. She frankly admits that she is “never happy but when she is with her husband” (4 October 1813). According to Sophy, “the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship. While we were together . . . there was nothing to be feared. Thank God!” Likewise, Jane Austen depicts the Crofts as a “particularly attached and happy” couple. Jane Austen’s appreciation of Fanny’s strong desire to support Charles, to find a community of friends, and to be his constant and affectionate companion, may have influenced her ascription of those traits to Sophy Croft.

In his biography of Jane Austen, Park Honan suggests that she drew on some aspects of[Fanny for Mrs Croft and that she admired Fanny’s “unfussiness and gallant good sense” (Jane Austen: Her Life [1997]). My research into Fanny’s articulate and candid letters written from the Namur, together with records and accounts in her pocket diary, supports this observation. They show her organizing domestic arrangements, acquiring food and necessities for her family at bargain prices and identifying books for the education of her five-year-old daughter, Cassy. In a similar vein, within her domestic sphere, Mrs. Croft proves to be practical and business-like in the matter of arranging for the tenancy of Kellynch Hall and effecting practical alterations once they are resident there.

The three naval wives in question, Louisa, Fanny, and Sophy, make up a diverse trio. Louisa proved to be largely absent from Thomas Hardy’s naval life, but Fanny supported Charles in his naval career with courage, spirit, and dedication. It is fortunate that Jane had a “sister” of Fanny’s ilk, whose richness of experience as a naval wife could contribute to Austen’s creativity when she came to draw the very likable and competent Sophy Croft in Persuasion.

Quotations are from the Penguin Classics edition of Persuasion, edited by D.W. Harding (1965), and the Oxford edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (4th edition, 2011).

It is likely that Jane’s sensitivities to Fanny’s naval experiences also influenced some aspects of Anne Elliot and Mrs. Harville. For a full discussion of the other naval wives and more about the resonances between Fanny and Sophy Croft, see Chapter 9 in Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen, by Sheila Johnson Kindred (2017).

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Thirtieth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Judith Sears, Marcia McClintock Folsom, and Deborah Yaffe.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).  

“It sometimes seems as if I had no sooner learned to talk than I was doing it wrong,” writes Rohan Maitzen in her guest post on Jane Austen’s Anne Elliot and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and “women’s long struggle to be heard on their own terms.” Rohan is an English professor and literary critic, and she lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Her essays and reviews have appeared in Open Letters Monthly, Quill & Quire, the Times Literary Supplement, and several other publications, and she blogs at Novel Readings. She created a free online guide called Middlemarch for Book Clubs, which you can find here. Rohan is an excellent guide to Middlemarch (which I know from personal experience because I took her class on George Eliot when I was a graduate student), and she recently won an award from Dalhousie University for her outstanding work as a teacher. It’s a pleasure to introduce her contribution to my blog series “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”

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It sometimes seems as if I had no sooner learned to talk than I was doing it wrong. Over the years I have been mocked, criticized, disciplined—even, once, slapped in the face—for talking too much, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong tone of voice; at other times I have been pressured to say more, to share, to discuss, to explain, to justify. The more fluent I became with language, the more it became a double-edged sword: I have been praised for being articulate and blamed for being intimidating, applauded for arguing forcefully and shamed for “ranting.”

I eventually came to see my fraught relationship with speech—along with the experiences of other women I have seen silenced, suppressed, or (more rarely) boldly speaking out—as part of women’s long struggle to be heard on their own terms in a world that rarely welcomes their voices. History has provided the context, but it is novels—particularly Persuasion and Jane Eyre—that have given me both comfort and courage as I continue to navigate this difficult terrain.

These two novels perhaps seem an unlikely pairing: one, after all, is famous for its heroine’s reticence, the other for its heroine’s rage. For most of her novel, Anne Elliot says too little; often, in hers, Jane Eyre says far too much. Elizabeth Bennet is Jane’s more obvious cousin: from the beginning of Pride and Prejudice she says exactly what she thinks. For all the pleasure I take in Lizzie’s liveliness, though, there’s an element of fantasy to her fearless conversation. Persuasion, in contrast, offers a deeply moving representation of the suffering that comes from being unable to speak your mind, an all-too-common experience for women made all the more painful for Anne because in her world (as Louisa Musgrove’s fall from grace so clearly illustrates) self-control really is a virtue and desire truly can be a wayward force. It’s precisely because speech is so ethically and emotionally complicated for Anne that the scene at the White Hart is so suspenseful and, ultimately, so satisfying.

Jane initially errs in the opposite direction; her immoderate outbursts, her vehement demands for equality and justice, are as thrilling as Anne’s inhibitions are frustrating. But the violence of Jane’s speech proves as destructive as it is liberating; her struggle is to control it, to channel its energy so that, like Anne, she can lead a life that reconciles her desires with her principles. While Anne’s most significant speech finally breaks down the barriers set by principle and propriety, Jane’s asserts the primacy of morality over passion: “I care for myself,” she silently declares, in the face of Rochester’s urgent plea that she abandon “Conscience and Reason” in favor of their love (Volume 3, Chapter 1). Stirring as her earlier words to Rochester are—“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” (Volume 2, Chapter 8)—this later moment reminds us that what we say to ourselves can be as powerful as what we say to others.

In both Persuasion and Jane Eyre, agency, not just self-expression, is the ultimate goal: the point is not for Anne and Jane simply to demand what they want, but for them to achieve what they need and deserve. “Power,” Carolyn Heilbrun observes, “is the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter” (Writing a Woman’s Life [1988]). That’s what, in their complementary ways, Anne and Jane are seeking, and it’s what I’m after too. To an extent that might surprise those who know me and see only, or mostly, a confident and self-sufficient exterior, I still find it stressful deciding if, when, or how to speak up. I carry the psychological baggage of years of criticism, which now manifests as a tendency to brood, second-guess, and self-censor. That’s why I am inspired by women who emerge victorious from this ongoing struggle—by Anne and Jane, and even more by Austen and Brontë, who took the pen into their own hands to show us that whatever the hazards, we must and can find the words to speak for ourselves.

Quotations are from the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Jane Eyre, edited by Margaret Smith, with Introduction and revised notes by Sally Shuttleworth (2000).

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Twenty-ninth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Sheila Johnson Kindred, Judith Sears, and Marcia McClintock Folsom.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Susannah Fullerton has been President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia for twenty-two years. She’s the author of Jane Austen and Crime, A Dance with Jane Austen, Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and, most recently, a memoir, Jane & I: A Tale of Austen Addiction. She runs popular literary tours to the UK, Europe, and the USA—and sometimes to Prince Edward Island, to visit Green Gables and other L.M. Montgomery-related sites—and her monthly newsletter, “Notes from a Book Addict,” is enjoyed by readers around the world. Her website is https://susannahfullerton.com.au.

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A couple of years ago, Susannah contributed a guest post on “The Gypsies in Emma ” for my blog series “Emma in the Snow,” and I’m delighted to introduce her contribution to my current series, “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion .” [image error]

Jane Austen gives us several constant readers. Edward teases Marianne Dashwood about her devotion to Scott and Cowper, Fanny borrows favourite books from the library so she can read them with her sister, Mary Bennet rereads moralist works, while Catherine Morland is absorbed at least once by The Mysteries of Udolpho. But in my view, no character in Jane Austen is so totally devoted to one particular book as is Sir Walter Elliot and of course that book is The Baronetage.

The rank of Baronet was first created by King James I, who raised money for his wars by creating a new rank and selling it to men of good birth who had an annual income of ₤1000 from their estates. Many men were pressured into buying a Baronetcy. When Charles II came to the throne, he created 159 new Baronets. So with all these new titles, there was a need for a book which would provide details, estates and ranks. Several compendia of baronets and their genealogies were published from the 17th Century on. William Dugdale produced The Baronage of England (Dugdale is referred to in Persuasion: “how mentioned in Dugdale …” [Volume 1, Chapter 1]), Sir William Betham produced a Baronetage, and then John Debrett, son of a French Hugeunot who worked for a publisher, felt there was a need firstly for his 1769 New Peerage and then in 1808 his Baronetage of England. Jane Austen does not state it explicitly, but this is almost certainly what Sir Walter has lying about conveniently for his frequent perusal. It was the Who’s Who of its day and even listed extinct baronetcies—Sir Walter bewails the extinction of titles given out by Stuart Kings, and disapproves of its new titles.

He turns to this volume for consolation and to puff up his own importance, but the irony is that the rank of Baronet was not actually a very high one. His ancestors were loyal to the crown and were made baronets by Charles II, but the King sold baronetcies, so possibly Sir Walter’s ancestor bought his? The wife of a Baronet was given the honorific of Lady (Lady Russell, Lady Middleton, Lady Bertram are examples), but not with her first name (Lady Catherine keeps hers because she was daughter of an Earl) because being a baronet was one of the lower ranks. Yet Sir Walter is unjustifiably proud of being “Sir”: “nor could the valet of any new made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society” (Volume 1, Chapter 1). Jane Austen lowers his rank even further by hinting at his Scottish and Irish connections—the ranks of those countries were seen as inferior to English ones. The name Walter is Scottish, and their connections the Dalrymples are Irish.

So Jane Austen introduces us to Sir Walter as a man trapped in his own past, who constantly reads a book which fails to elevate him as much as he thinks it does. His entry in The Baronetage is given in full in the first chapter of Persuasion and contains many fascinating details. Stuart names—Mary and Elizabeth—are used again and again over the generations so as to evoke Charles II, there is reference to his ancestors “representing a borough” (Volume 1, Chapter 1), so clearly they have been Members of Parliament, and the heir presumptive is named. I find several details intriguing. The date on which Mary marries Charles Musgrove, 16 December, is Jane Austen’s own birthday. Is she showing that the future lies in the hands of women—she herself has produced novels to carry on her name, while Mary produces sons who do not bear the name of Elliot, but could inherit if William Elliot has no heir. Then there is that still-born son, born in 1789, a year which would have resonated with all contemporary readers. It was the year of the French Revolution, when legitimate male heirs were heading to the guillotine and society was overthrowing the old order. It was a year which resulted in a power vacuum, which of course Napoleon (a man of obscure birth and no rank at all) soon stepped in to fill. In England there was also a vacuum—the mad king had been incarcerated and the Regency given to his unsatisfactory son. Jane Austen wants us to think about the vacuum left by Sir Walter having no son. Will it be filled by William Elliot and perhaps the children he has with Mrs. Clay? Or will the Elliot daughters produce sons who might inherit? Loss in a family tree was a highly topical issue. Will the pen writing future entries in the Baronetage be in female hands? The Baronetage entry makes very clear that Sir Walter is the last in his direct patriarchal line, is powerless to alter the future, and is a man frozen in time, unable to adapt. All he can do is helplessly record what has happened. And the last entry we hear of him making “in the volume of honour” (Volume 2, Chapter 12) is that of Anne’s marriage to Captain Wentworth. Interestingly, Elizabeth, Mary and Anne are all names of Queens who ruled in their own right, not as spouses. Will Anne be the queen who shapes the future destiny of her family?

Elizabeth has also loved the volume and turned to it often. She and her father seem unchanging, their sterile looks still handsome and unlined. But Elizabeth is rapidly going off the precious book because it has not yet recorded her own “suitable marriage” to a man with “baronet-blood” (Volume 1, Chapter 1). She now pushes it away, with averted eyes—it pains her as it reminds her she has created no new entry in its pages.

Mary shares her father’s obsession with rank and worries that Captain Wentworth might be made a baronet which would give Anne precedence over herself. “It would be but a new creation, however, and I never think much of your new creations” (Volume 2, Chapter 12). But she moves on from the book because she has married into another family.

It is Anne, “only Anne,” who does not bother to look at The Baronetage, and who will at the end of the novel challenge all that such a book represents. She dislikes the empty ranks and titles which might have been bought. Instead, she reads the Navy List, the book of the future, in which men of energy and merit earn their ranks and face dangers, even if their complexions are ruined in the process. Anne speaks often throughout the novel of change and its effects. She herself changes during the novel—she is not fixed and sterile like her father. Sir Walter does not read the Navy Lists. He has no interest in a future in which he can see no important role for himself.

Reading is important in Persuasion—Benwick reads to lessen grief, Anne can read in Italian, she reads with joy a second proposal from the man she loves, Mary borrows library books but fails to read them and Elizabeth refuses to read what Lady Russell lends her. In Persuasion how and what one reads tells us a lot about character. Sir Walter is never mentioned as reading any other work than The Baronetage. We begin reading Persuasion by reading about a man reading his favourite book, but Jane Austen, by including The Baronetage in her novel, makes us think about who reads wisely and who reads foolishly. Who holds the pen and who will hold it in the future? Which books “make the richness of the present age”? Surely her Persuasion is one of them? Who reads works that reflect the reality of life and show what the future will hold? To read only of the past means being stuck with The Baronetage; the future is represented by the Navy List and the new poetry appearing on the scene.

The Baronetage is like a mirror for Sir Walter—he holds it up and sees reflected his own rank and title, his motto and coat of arms. But when a man of the Navy moves into Kellynch, one of the first things he does is remove a great mirror. Sir Walter’s mirror/book, Jane Austen indicates, is likely to go the same way. Jane Austen so appropriately includes in the pages of Persuasion a book which shows us the past, the present state of her most egotistical character, and also his future.

Quotations are from the Oxford illustrated editions of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1946).

“Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)

Twenty-eighth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Rohan Maitzen, Sheila Johnson Kindred, and Judith Sears.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Kim Wilson is the author of At Home with Jane Austen, Tea with Jane Austen, and In the Garden with Jane Austen. She’s a writer, speaker, editor, tea lover, and gardening enthusiast, a life member of JASNA, and the Regional Coordinator for JASNA Wisconsin. She lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and she often travels to give lectures on Jane Austen for the Road Scholars and other organizations. Her website is KimWilsonAuthor.com and she’s on Twitter @KimWilsonAuthor. She also has some Pinterest boards featuring Jane Austen, Regency, and Georgian pins. At Home with Jane Austen, “an enchanting biographical sketch” (Library Journal), was named the #1 Non-Fiction Austen-Inspired Title of 2014 by Austenprose.

When I hosted a celebration of Jane Austen’s Emma, Kim contributed a guest post on “Emma’s Accomplishments and Mrs. Elton’s Resources,” and I’m happy to welcome her back with today’s guest post on Henry Tilney’s housekeeper.

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In Northanger Abbey, General Tilney proposes that he, his daughter, Eleanor, and Catherine Morland visit his son Henry’s parsonage for dinner, perhaps trying to impress Catherine with her future home if she marries Henry. “You are not to put yourself at all out of your way. Whatever you may happen to have in the house will be enough,” he tells Henry, claiming that Eleanor and Catherine will make allowance for “a bachelor’s table.” Henry knows his father, however, and returns that very day to the parsonage, telling Catherine that “no time is to be lost in frightening my old housekeeper out of her wits, because I must go and prepare a dinner for you” (Volume 2, Chapter 11). Why will the poor woman be so frightened of arranging for a dinner that includes only her master and three guests? The answer, of course, lies with the overbearing General Tilney himself.

Catherine has already observed that the general is “very particular in his eating” (Volume 2, Chapter 11). When she breakfasted with the Tilneys before leaving Bath, “never in her life before had she beheld half such variety on a breakfast‑table” (Volume 2, Chapter 5). At Northanger Abbey the same abundance prevails. The general, who loves good fruit, boasts to Catherine (in his indirect way) of the “valuable fruits” grown on his estate, especially pineapples, expensive to grow and worth as much as a guinea ($100 or more) each in London (Volume 2, Chapter 7). He drinks cocoa and coffee, both expensive articles, and at his table serves French bread, a fine, enriched bread made expensive by the inclusion of milk and eggs. The meals served to the Tilney family are obviously plentiful, varied, and expensive, and are no doubt the product of an excellent cook.

General Tilney almost certainly employs a “man-cook” rather than a woman, though perhaps not the “two or three French cooks at least” that Mrs. Bennet thinks Mr. Darcy must have in Pride and Prejudice (Volume 3, Chapter 12). A man-cook, said Sarah and Samuel Adams (who were “Fifty years Servants in different Families”), was “in all respects the same as that of a female Cook,” but was nevertheless “a requisite member in the establishment of a man of fashion,” and was thought to possess “a peculiar tact in manufacturing many fashionable foreign delicacies, or of introducing certain seasonings and flavours in his dishes.” Supported by “several female assistants . . . employed in roasting, boiling, and all the ordinary manual operations of the kitchen,” the man-cook’s attention was “chiefly directed to the stew-pan, in the manufacture of stews, fricassees, fricandeaux, &c.” He was frequently paid “twice or thrice the sum given to the most experienced female English Cook” (The Complete Servant [1825]).

The Northanger Abbey kitchen is as efficient and modern a kitchen as any chef could wish. The general has done “every thing that money and taste could do, to give comfort and elegance” to his residence; in the kitchen the “General’s improving hand had not loitered [and] every modern invention to facilitate the labour of the cooks, had been adopted” (Volume 2, Chapter 8). Among the features of the abbey’s kitchen are modern stoves and “hot closets,” which are heated cabinets with shelves to keep cooked dishes hot, “a great acquisition in Kitchens, where the Dinner waits after it is dressed,” according to the famous Regency gourmet William Kitchiner (The Cook’s Oracle [1822 edition]).

“Puff Paste,” by Thomas Rowlandson, c. 1810 (Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

Jane Austen paints an appealing picture of hero Henry Tilney’s parsonage, a “new-built substantial stone house” standing “among fine meadows” in the “pretty” village of Woodston. General Tilney, who believes “there are few country parsonages in England half so good,” has taken care to make it a residence worthy of his son. There are such elegant modern features as a “semi-circular sweep” driveway and “windows reaching to the ground” in the “prettily-shaped” drawing room, which smitten Catherine Morland thinks is “the prettiest room in the world.” The dining parlour is “of a commodious, well proportioned size, and handsomely fitted up,” and there is “an excellent kitchen-garden,” stocked by the general himself (Volume 2, Chapters 7 and 11). No doubt the general has also outfitted the parsonage kitchen with conveniences, so Henry’s cook is able to prepare meals on the best modern equipment.

Henry’s “old housekeeper” may hold the office of cook as well as housekeeper, a likely occurrence, said John Perkins (“Cook to Earl Gower, Sir Matthew Lamb, and Lord Viscount Melbourn”). “The station of house-keeper is so frequently joined with other employments in the family . . . as for instance, house-keeper and lady’s maid, or house-keeper and cook” (Every Woman Her Own House-keeper [1796]). But as Henry has an income of “independence and comfort” (Volume 2, Chapter 16), he possibly employs a cook as well as a housekeeper, though she may be only a respectable woman from the village who is not highly trained. The Austens were well aware of the difficulty of finding a cook who was competent in all aspects of cookery. At their Southampton house, Molly sent up a boiled leg of mutton “underdone even for James,” Jane reported to her and James’s sister, Cassandra. “Our dinners have certainly suffered not a little by having only Molly’s head and Molly’s hands to conduct them; she fries better than she did, but not like Jenny” (7-8 January 1807). At Chawton they had better luck, Jane thought. “I continue to like our old Cook quite as well as ever. . . . Her Cookery is at least tolerable;—her pastry is the only deficiency” (31 May 1811). Indeed, as William Kitchiner noted, “such is the endless variety of culinary preparations, it would be . . . vain . . . to expect to find a cook who was equally perfect in all the operations of the spit, the stewpan, and the rolling-pin” (The Cook’s Oracle [1817 edition]).

Henry’s housekeeper has a great deal expected of her, even if she is not also the cook. John Perkins wrote that “she must be well acquainted with the business of a cook and confectioner.” In addition to shopping for food and other household commodities,

a house-keeper must be able also to form the plan of an entertainment, to draw up a bill of fare, and to order the courses for every different table; she should know what is most liked of all sorts of entries, soups, roast dishes, and side ones. . . .  When an entertainment is to be made . . . she ought to form a regular plan of the whole entertainment, and make a draught of each course, as well as the dessert; ranging every one in its proper place, observing well the sizes of the dishes, and what they are to contain (Every Woman Her Own House-Keeper [1796]).

Samuel and Sarah Adams pointed out that a housekeeper was not only responsible for such planning and for directing the cook (unless she also happened to occupy that office herself), but also for “the elegant and tasteful arrangement of the table” and to see that the butler or footman had placed the dishes properly on the table to “form a pleasing, inviting, and well-grouped picture” (The Complete Servant [1825]).

Henry and his housekeeper must necessarily plan the menu according to the season. The day of the Woodston Parsonage dinner, April 8 (Jane Austen Society of North America – Wisconsin Region “A Year with Jane Austen 2018” calendar), occurs at “such a dead time of year, no wild fowl, no game,” complains General Tilney (Volume 2, Chapter 11). There is also little fresh fruit and produce available in the spring. Henry knows his father’s tastes, but John Simpson (“Cook to the late Marquis of Buckingham”) noted that “Young Men and Women Cooks are frequently at a loss in writing Bills of Fare” (A Complete System of Cookery [1813]). To assist, cookbook authors such as Simpson and Duncan MacDonald (“Late Head Cook at the Bedford Tavern and Hotel, Covent Garden”) provided sample bills of fare and “Lists of the various Articles in Season—Fish, Flesh, Fowl, Fruit, &c. for every Month in the Year” (The New London Family Cook [1808]). See accompanying figures.

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Articles in Season in April. From The New London Family Cook, by Duncan MacDonald (1808).

Suggested bill of fare (menu) for April 8. From A Complete System of Cookery, by John Simpson (1813).

Suggested bill of fare for April. From The New London Family Cook, by Duncan MacDonald (1808).

A form of a dessert for winter, suitable for winter and spring, when there is little fresh fruit available. From The New London Family Cook, by Duncan MacDonald (1808).

General Tilney expects dinner to be on the table at 4:00 sharp. As the time of dinner approaches, the housekeeper, cook, and other servants would grow more anxious. The Adamses describe the nerve-wracking scene:

It requires not only great skill but the utmost attention and exertion to send up the whole of a great dinner, with all its accompaniments, in perfect order. . . . A scene of activity now commences, in which you must necessarily be cool, collected, and attentive.—Have an eye to the roast meat, and an ear to the boils,—and let your thoughts continually recur to the rudiments of your art, which at this moment must be called into practical requisition. You will endeavour that every kind of vegetable, and of sauce, be made to keep pace with the dishes to which they respectively belong—so that all may go up stairs smoking hot together, and in due order. (The Complete Servant [1825])

With so many dishes to cook and coordinate, it’s no wonder that Henry’s cook becomes distracted at one point and ruins one dish, the melted butter. Melted butter is actually melted butter sauce, a base sauce that can be flavored in many ways. How to make it properly to avoid its “oiling” (breaking down and losing its emulsion) was the subject of much debate and distress for Georgian and Regency cooks. Still, Henry and his staff must be quite relieved by how well most of the dishes turn out. Catherine sees that the dinner is a success: “She could not but observe that the abundance of the dinner did not seem to create the smallest astonishment in the general; nay, that he was even looking at the side table for cold meat which was not there. His son and daughter’s observations were of a different kind. They had seldom seen him eat so heartily at any table but his own, and never before known him so little disconcerted by the melted butter’s being oiled” (Volume 2, Chapter 11).

Quotations are from the Oxford editions of Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice, edited and with an introduction by R.W. Chapman (3rd edition, reprinted 1988) and the Oxford edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (4th edition, 2011).

Twenty-seventh in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts on Persuasion by Susannah Fullerton, Rohan Maitzen, and Sheila Johnson Kindred.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

“In an age when we are examining sexual predation and male power as never before, it may be revealing to cast a cold eye upon Jane Austen’s ogreish character, General Tilney,” writes Diana Birchall in today’s guest post for “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.” Diana recently retired from her career as a story analyst, reading novels for Warner Bros Studios. She is the author of several Jane Austen-related novels, including Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma and Mrs. Elton in America, and of plays which have been performed at JASNA events as well as at Chawton House Library. She has also written a literary biography of the first Asian American novelist, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), who was her grandmother. Originally from New York City, she lives in Santa Monica with her poet husband Peter, librarian son Paul, and their three cats Pindar, Martial, and Catullus.

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A couple of years ago, Diana contributed a story called “Mrs. Elton’s Donkey” to my “Emma in the Snow” blog series, and when I hosted a celebration of Austen’s Mansfield Park, she sent me a story about “The Scene-Painter.” Welcome back, Diana! Thank you for your essay on General Tilney, and also for sharing with us, at the end of this post, an excerpt from your work-in-progress, The Bride of Northanger.

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In an age when we are examining sexual predation and male power as never before, it may be revealing to cast a cold eye upon Jane Austen’s ogreish character, General Tilney. Jane Austen knew her ogres. As a young author she was as familiar with Gothic horror tales as her still younger heroine, Catherine Morland could be. General Tilney is her parodic Gothic villain, the ironic joke being that his sensibilities do not hark back to lurid crimes of the 15th century. Rather, he is a thoroughly modern man, chiefly interested in money, materialism, and his own superiority. Far from being confined to an historical romance, he is so prevalent a type, that we can see him in many places of power even today, as if two centuries had not passed since Jane Austen wrote him into existence.

Catherine, with her imagination full of “horrid” novels, and very little knowledge of the world, has not the experience to know what to make of such a man, and misreads him at every stage, which parallels her deluded assumption of Northanger Abbey as an edifice of Gothic fiction. Her artless assumptions are one of the first things Henry Tilney notices about her, evidently finding her innocence and simplicity refreshing after a lifetime of watching his father’s signature unpleasantness and double dealing machinations.

General Tilney’s premier technique for manipulation is a florid insincerity, using repeated, empty praise, protesting one thing while doing another. The reader (if not Catherine) sees through him quickly, his false graciousness revealing him as the domestic tyrant he is. His officiousness is sulfurously on display, as when proposing a family visit to Henry’s parsonage, he says airily: “There is no need to fix. You are not to put yourself at all out of your way” (Volume 2, Chapter 11). Then he quickly switches off that hokum, and dictates his own terms rigidly arranged down to the quarter hour.

Used to this sort of thing as Henry is, it is no wonder that Catherine’s innocence and honesty are as appealing to him, as perhaps, his profession as clergyman is a solace. He smilingly tells her: “How very little trouble it can give you to understand the motive of other people’s actions…. With you, it is not, How is such a one likely to be influenced, What is the inducement most likely to act upon such a person’s feelings, age, situation, and probable habits of life considered” (Volume 2, Chapter 1).

That is what he has witnessed all his life, and it explains why such a clever man should like a pellucidly simple girl: manipulative thinking like his father’s could not be farther from the workings of Catherine’s mind. Yet Catherine is increasingly bewildered by her own growing dislike of the delightful Henry’s father. She notices how his mere presence is a troubling damper to his children:

That he was perfectly agreeable and good-natured, and altogether a very charming man, did not admit of a doubt, for he was tall and handsome, and Henry’s father. He could not be accountable for his children’s want of spirits, or for her want of enjoyment in his company. (Volume 2, Chapter 1)

Catherine’s uneasiness about her future father-in-law fuels her Gothic fantasies, as in her imaginings she builds him into a murderer, who may have killed his wife. She connects him with the evil Signor Montoni of The Mysteries of Udolpho:

And, when she saw him in the evening, while she worked with her friend, slowly pacing the drawing–room for an hour together in silent thoughtfulness, with downcast eyes and contracted brow, she felt secure from all possibility of wronging him. It was the air and attitude of a Montoni! (Volume 2, Chapter 8)

In a way she is not wrong, for General Tilney, although wealthy himself, is a fortune-hunter, his motives not dissimilar from that of his prototype Montoni. He notes Henry’s liking for Catherine only as a way to promote the match and secure the fortune he believes her to possess, led on by the rattle of John Thorpe. When he learns from the same unreliable source that there is no fortune, he dismisses Catherine with shocking rudeness, proving that he cares nothing for her or his son’s happiness. He also shows his own credulity, in believing such a rattle as Thorpe in the first place. Even when he finally ungraciously assents to the marriage, he expresses himself in contemptuous terms, giving Henry permission for him “to be a fool if he liked it!” (Volume 2, Chapter 16). Yet he himself has been the fool, or the tool of one.

Jane Austen presents a masterly exhibit of masculine, patriarchal abuse of power in her magnificently hollow portrait of General Tilney. There is also a subtle element of sexual predation, as he woos Catherine through Henry. He treats his own daughter as a submissive and slave until she is elevated to Vicountess. And he makes love to Catherine with gross flattery and subterranean sexual appeal. Catherine sees that he is “a very handsome man, of a commanding aspect, past the bloom, but not past the vigour of life” (Volume 1, Chapter 10), as he looks at her with interest. “Confused by his notice, and blushing . . . she turned away her head.”  Later, she breaks rules of propriety by bursting into the Tilneys’ drawing-room. Perhaps in response to this unconventional entrance, General Tilney, alone with her for the first time, grasps the opportunity for oily gallantry with a sexual tinge, alluding to the “elasticity of her walk” (Volume 1, Chapter 13).

Whatever General Tilney’s sexual predilections, he is not a byword for open misbehavior like the Admiral Crawford of Mansfield Park. Catherine never fears for her chastity at his hands, yet she is wrong again, for he throws her out with as much attack and as little concern as if she was a discarded sexual creature.

Catherine’s overbearing host turns out to be no Gothic fancy, but tyrant enough. She concludes that “in suspecting General Tilney of murder or shutting up his wife she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty” (Volume 2, Chapter 16).

The critical attention of this ill-tempered man is a nightmare to anyone not his equal in status (“Dinner to be on table directly!” [Volume 2, Chapter 6]).  Perhaps it is in rising to be a General that he imbibed martinet ways, bringing his command home to his family, and illustrating in his own person and home what tyranny is. He is gracious only to his perceived peers (“They are a set of very worthy men. They have half a buck from Northanger twice a year; and I dine with them whenever I can” [Volume 2, Chapter 11]).

Northanger Abbey was written after the French Revolution, and years of riots and unrest that affected Austen’s own family. We may wonder what General Tilney’s professional role was during these turbulent years, but Austen tells us almost nothing about his past. It may be that the readers of her day would not need to have the familiar explained.

A rare clue is when Mrs. Allen learns from a friend that the Tilneys are “very rich . . . [Mrs. Tilney] had a very large fortune; and, when she married, her father gave her twenty thousand pounds, and five hundred to buy wedding-clothes” (Volume 1, Chapter 9). In Georgian England, such an heiress would not have married a pauper. And a young and wealthy married man would not be likely to go out to fight in the American Revolution, or to the India of Warren Hastings.

However the General became a General, it is not the purpose of my inquiry to try to construe his career; we may infer that he at one time enjoyed power, and is now, in retirement, abusing it in his own family. With no more active work to do, and his own approach to old age, he occupies himself with consumerism and improvements of the most aggressive forward-thinking modernity, in amusing contrast with the fantasies of Catherine, who “cared for no furniture of a more modern date than the fifteenth century” (Volume 2, Chapter 8).

One of my favorite passages shows off the General’s materialism. With his taste for having the latest things, he is absurdly self-deprecating, and suggestive to Catherine:

The elegance of the breakfast set forced itself on Catherine’s notice when they were seated at table; and luckily, it had been the General’s choice. He was enchanted by her approbation of his taste, confessed it to be neat and simple, thought it right to encourage the manufacture of his country; and for his part, to his uncritical palate, the tea was as well flavoured from the clay of Staffordshire, as from that of Dresden or Sêve. But this was quite an old set, purchased two years ago. The manufacture was much improved since that time; he had seen some beautiful specimens when last in town, and had he not been perfectly without vanity of that kind, might have been tempted to order a new set. He trusted, however, that an opportunity might ere long occur of selecting one—though not for himself. Catherine was probably the only one of the party who did not understand him. (Volume 2, Chapter 7)

Here is a snippet from my own parody-of-a-parody work-in-progress, The Bride of Northanger:

“It is the happiest day I ever spent,” Catherine declared, as they sat down to tea at their own table, spread with their own new china set, General Tilney’s wedding-present, which Catherine had not before seen.

He was a connoisseur in china, as in many other things, and Catherine could not but admire the delicate gold-and-white dishes and cups, in their prettiness and abundance, however empty was the sentiment behind the sending.

“Happiness is a very proper state in a new bride,” observed Henry, “and I may take the opportunity to tell you that I am happy, too. Upon my word, my father did us well; that is a set that might last us all our lives, even if we have as large a family as yours.”

Catherine blushed at this reference, and then felt it ungracious to have a secret hope that using the china would not always make her think of the giver.

“The gold leaves are very pretty,” she said, taking up a cup. “I never saw any thing like these little symbols woven round the edges. What do you think they signify?”

“I do not know. I had not observed,” said Henry, examining a saucer closely. “You are right, however, they look almost like letters, do they not?”

“Not in any language I ever saw. Is it Russian? Is it Hebrew? Is it Arabic?”

Henry squinted at length, and finally said, “No. I perceive they are English letters, but they are so very small, I do not think they can possibly be read without a magnification glass. We have not one here. I should have to send to Cambridge for such a thing.”

“Well, I wish you would. If there is some secret writing on our china, I should like to know what it says. Do you think your father knows about it?”

“Most certainly. My father does nothing without deliberation. And he had this china made up especially for you—he told me so, in the letter that accompanied it. I can’t think what he means by this.”

“Perhaps the letters are a motto of some sort,” suggested Catherine. “My mother has a set of plates that have a blessing on them, and the words, Hunger is the Best Sauce.”

“Somehow I feel it is not that,” said Henry dryly.

The eyes of the young husband and wife met.

“’Tis very strange,” said Catherine. “Are you quite sure you cannot make out any words at all? I could not, but then I only know English.”

“It does not look like any thing else,” said Henry doubtfully, “it might be Latin, but so tiny…. Does this look like the letter T to you?”

“Not very much—oh, yes, perhaps it might.”

“I think it is English.  T, C, I . . . something . . . L, A, M, I believe, only the size of pinpoints.”

“But that does not mean any thing, Henry.”

“I cannot tell,” he said slowly, “but I think the letters may be written backwards. Then it could be—Maledict. No, surely not. I cannot make out any more.”

He put the saucer down, rather hard.

“That does not sound much like a blessing,” Catherine faltered.

The young couple sat silent, as they each thought of what the words might mean, and what was the opposite of a blessing.

“I suppose I must write to thank your father,” said Catherine reluctantly, “but Henry, I hope you will not take it amiss if I say I prefer not to use this set of china.”

“No, I’d like to break every piece,” he said savagely.

“It was the air and attitude of a Montoni!” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)

Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Northanger Abbey, edited by R.W. Chapman, reprint edition of 1983.

Twenty-sixth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Kim Wilson, Susannah Fullerton, and Rohan Maitzen.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).