“If Britain has a reputation for political stability, it is a reputation of very recent origin. European travellers visiting this country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were appalled by the disorder they witnessed”

Leslie Mitchell reviews two works on English rebellion in Literary Review

I missed the opportunity to post about a remarkable, ground-breaking exhibition that was recently held at the British Museum. As readers who check in on Georgian Image Bookmarking already know, I’m fascinated with Georgian and Regency era painting and drawing, especially portraiture, and this exhibit focused on a particularly interesting type of portrait, the personal likenesses that were carried like photographs or fashioned into lockets and rings. The following is an exerpt from the blurb for The Intimate Portrait:

“Portraits were displayed in public at the Royal Academy exhibitions but behind the scenes, in private sitting rooms, studies and bedrooms some of them served a more intimate role. Miniatures were often worn as jewellery to keep a loved one close; fragile pastels protected by glittering gilt frames were displayed on walls, while drawings were framed or mounted in albums to be shown to friends and family.

Until now, there has never been a serious investigation of these captivating modes of portraiture, and it has largely been forgotten that these smaller, more intimate portraits were also enjoyed by a wider public, and were exhibited in their hundreds at the Royal Academy in London and other public exhibition spaces in Britain. Sir Thomas Lawrence’s magnificent portrait drawing of Mary Hamilton, which will feature in the exhibition, was one of a dozen pastel and chalk drawings he showed at the RA in 1789.

The exhibition features nearly 200 examples in a range of materials, from pencil, chalk, watercolours and pastels to miniatures on ivory. It includes many self-portraits as well as intimate portraits of the artists’ families and friends. Sitters vary from the merchant and middle classes to the aristocracy, actors and celebrities including Lady Hamilton, and political and literary figures such as Sir Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington and Robert Burns.”

Though the exhibition has closed, the Museum’s online shop offers a beautiful catalogue that supplies images and details for those fascinated as I am by the Georgian intimate portrait.

William Alexander, Self-portrait, 1792–4

Richard Westall, Portrait of a Woman seated in a Landscape with a spaniel, 1793

Archibald Skirving, Self-portrait, 1790

Charlotte Jones, The Eye of Princess Charlotte, c. 1817

Richard Cosway, Elizabeth Courtenay, later Lady Somerset, c. 1788

Sir Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Mary Hamilton, 1789

“…She was a woman of much deeper feeling than the world imagined,’ one friend of Anna Barbauld said. She was also a woman of extraordinary sense, writing at the height of invasion fever in 1803, ‘I am sure we do not believe in the danger we pretend to believe in; and I am sure that none of us can even form an idea how we should feel if we were forced to believe it.’ Against the grain of her own times and against ours, that likes its Regency women glamorous and scandalous, Anna Letitia Barbauld emerges as a sort of intellectual heroine…”

Read the entirety of A Dissenting Voice, Claire Harman’s review of Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment by William McCarthy at Literary Review

The Watsons is a fascinating fragment believed to have been abandoned by Austen in 1803. What makes the The Watsons so very interesting, aside from being a very enjoyable peice – the missing ending is plain enough for those familiar with Austen’s work, is the early  experimentation with plot points, character insights and style that Austen would later make entirely her own. It strikes one quite forcibly how familiar the characters. Here, in Emma Watson herself and her acquaintance and relatives,  are early versions of so many of Austen’s greatest profiles of understated elegance of mind and manners, of vulgarity and coarseness, of snobbery and coondescension. One particluar theme has echoes throughout Austen’s canon – the change from peace and gentility to oppression and poverty that is later explored through the experiences of the Dashwood sisters in Devonshire, Fanny Price in her soujourn in Portsmouth and Jane Fairfax’s transition from the Campbell’s household to her aunt’s in Highbury.

The Watson’s fragment can be read at Four Georges Archive.

In reference to the Northanger Canon I’ve often featured Valancourt Books on this site. Valancourt Books in an independent micro press that seeks out and publishes rare and often forgotten works from the past, including several titles in the Northanger Canon. The boys at Valancourt are doing great things for 18th century literature by editing and publishing the likes of Canon titles The Mysterious Warning, Clermont, The Castle of Wolfenbach, lThe Midnight Bell, The Necromancer and The Italian. Valancourt also publishes many other titles, all in beautiful editions, relevant to the era such as The Cenci by Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Two Emilys by Sophia Lee, Azemia by William Beckford (author of Gothic classic Vathek), Six Gothic Dramas, a collection from 18th century Gothic playwright Joanna Ballie, Glenarvon by Lord Byron’s one time lover Lady Caroline Lamb featuring Lamb’s characterization of the poet in the form of the titular hero, Marmaduke Herbert by famous Regency courtesan turned literary hostess and writer Marguerite, Countess of Blessington and many more from other periods, including one of my personal favorites, Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

You can help the Valancourt boys to keep doing their important work by following them on Twitter, joining their facebook group, reviewing their publications, recommending the publishers to your school or public librarian and of course purchasing your Northanger Canon and 18th century titles, or selecting something special from their stock of rare and second hand books.

Related topics on Grey Pony: Austen and the Picturesque Part III, La Terruer: The Northanger Canon, Sublime Anxiety: The Northanger Canon

Hallie Rubenhold’s 2008 work Lady Worsley’s Whim is a scholarly and highly entertaining account of the 1782 Criminal Conversation trial of the era. The details of the personal lives of Sir Richard Worsley, 7th Baron of Appuldercombe, his wife Lady Seymour Worsley and her lover George Bisset riveted society and, through the newspapers and the action in the courts, the general public.

BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime programme produced a very enjoyable reading by Rosamund Pike and it’s available to listen to at Four Georges Archive

Related Posts on Grey Pony: A Woman of Spirit: Lady Seymour, and Friends

Nelson’s Flagships 1807 Nicholas Pocock

“What I hope to bring together here is a comprehensive source for the era: weapons and armaments, personages, single ship and minor fleet actions, and way of life aboard a man o’war during the Age of Sail.”

I’m so thrilled that the author of Age of Sail and his fascinating website has become known to me.  He accomplishes just what his mission statement intends, and more besides, comprehending reviews also of  Georgian period maritime novels, such as the superb Horatio Hornblower books by C.S. Forester. I’m indebted to Age of Sail, I have always wished to know more about maritime life in the Georgian era, not least because the narratives of Persuasion and Mansfield Park are not only populated with characters in the navy, the plots are even driven at times by the movement of these maritime characters. Also, because two of Jane Austen’s brothers were sailors, and one rose to become an admiral, but really because the trade conducted, the travel accomplished, the exploratory research conducted and battles fought at sea had a phenomenal effect on Georgian Britain. Do visit.

“…by G–, you lost a fine sight by not being here in the morning to see the Thrush go out of harbour! I would not have been out of the way for a thousand pounds. Old Scholey ran in at breakfast-time, to say she had slipped her moorings and was coming out, I jumped up, and made but two steps to the platform. If ever there was a perfect beauty afloat, she is one; and there she lays at Spithead, and anybody in England would take her for an eight-and-twenty. I was upon the platform two hours this afternoon looking at her.” - Mansfield Park, chapter 38

“…I do assure you, ma’am,” pursued Mrs Croft, “that nothing can exceed the accommodations of a man-of-war; I speak, you know, of the higher rates. When you come to a frigate, of course, you are more confined; though any reasonable woman may be perfectly happy in one of them; and I can safely say, that the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship.”- Persuasion, chapter 8

Related topics on Grey Pony: Armed Neutrality: Horatio Nelson, Peaches and Cream: Lady Hamilton

“My dearest sister, now be serious. I want to talk very seriously. Let me know every thing that I am to know, without delay. Will you tell me how long you have loved him?”

It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

This important exchange, brief though it is, is the key to the most crucial plot development in Pride and Prejudice and is often overlooked, and more often, misinterpreted. Jane Austen did not write profuse descriptions of the experience of love. When her heroes and heroines declare themselves she simply lets the reader understand that they love, and are suited, to one another. When Elizabeth Bennet enlightens her sister Jane about her engagement to Darcy and her feelings for him, she jokes, a little but as ever with Austen, it is not all a joke. The couple’s potential for happiness and respectability is very great. Elizabeth’s assertion that her visit to Pemberley enlightened her as to her feelings for Darcy has been flippantly interpreted as a desire for Pemberley, for the position, prestige and income attending such an estate,  presuming on a hidden ambitiousness in Elizabeth’s character that is not supported by the text. To understand Elizabeth’s statement, the reader must understand the true delicacy of it’s author.

Great estates such as Pemberley were not infrequently subject to improvements in the late 18th century by those who inherited. Landscapes and prospects were of particular interest to the Georgians. There have been occasions when landowners have  shown little feeling for the history, the social obligations and true respectability of these great houses. Large estates were intertwined with the county not only via domestic employment, the leasing of residences and farmland and the produce of food but they affected too the spiritual well-being of the community, holding as they did the parishes within their gift. In Austen’s texts there are several pairings of anti-heroes and improving schemes:  Henry Crawford’s keen eye for improvements and the eschewing of tradional morality at Everingham,  Sotherton and Thorton Lacey, in Mansfield Park to name one example.

It is the non-improvers however, the humane trustees, whom Austen presents to the reader as the most worthy characters,  honouring the Knightly family’s ‘old neglect of prospect’¹ and their estate’s ‘abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up’ at Donwell Abbey in Emma and highlighting Darcy’s integrity in his stewardship of Pemberley:

“She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.”

Alistair M. Duckworth wrote² that estate improvements in Austen’s texts ‘go beyond an aesthetic meaning to suggest the nature and quality of an individual’s response to the social, ethical and religious values he inherits, and that ‘in Pride and Prejudice the aesthetic taste evident in the landscape of Pemberley permits Elizabeth and the reader to infer the fundamental worth of Darcy’s social and ethical outlook’.

¹ ‘neglect of prospect’, ie deliberately not decimating natural growth in order to create a view from or of a house, such as the plan to fell an old avenue of trees at Sotherton in Mansfield Park

² Mansfield Park and Estate Improvements: Jane Austen’s Grounds of Being by Alistair M. Duckworth, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jun., 1971), pp. 25-48

“When she was laid in the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had already chosen her kingdom.”

It is unusually long for a blogpost I know but I can’t resist posting this essay in it’s entirety. Virginia Woolf’s essay on Jane Austen was published in her 1925 collection of essays on books The Common Reader (First Series). Typically of Woolf, it’s style has a liquidity unique to it’s author and it’s substance is highly intelligent, and sets one thinking for days. 

The University of Adelaide eText Centre publishes both series of The Common Reader online. Essays in the First Series 1925 also include Defoe, The Lives of the Obscure: Taylors and Edgeworths and George Eliot.  There is moreover so much necessary reading in the Second Series 1925, including Dr Burney’s Evening Party, De Quincey’s Autobiography, Four Figures: Cowper and Lady Austen, Beau Brummel, Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy Wordsworth and “Aurora Leigh”.

Jane Austen by Virginia Woolf

It is probable that if Miss Cassandra Austen had had her way we should have had nothing of Jane Austen’s except her novels. To her elder sister alone did she write freely; to her alone she confided her hopes and, if rumour is true, the one great disappointment of her life; but when Miss Cassandra Austen grew old, and the growth of her sister’s fame made her suspect that a time might come when strangers would pry and scholars speculate, she burnt, at great cost to herself, every letter that could gratify their curiosity, and spared only what she judged too trivial to be of interest.

Hence our knowledge of Jane Austen is derived from a little gossip, a few letters, and her books. As for the gossip, gossip which has survived its day is never despicable; with a little rearrangement it suits our purpose admirably. For example, Jane “is not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve . . . Jane is whimsical and affected,” says little Philadelphia Austen of her cousin. Then we have Mrs. Mitford, who knew the Austens as girls and thought Jane “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers “. Next, there is Miss Mitford’s anonymous friend “who visits her now [and] says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of ‘single blessedness’ that ever existed, and that, until Pride and Prejudice showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or firescreen. . . . The case is very different now”, the good lady goes on; “she is still a poker—but a poker of whom everybody is afraid. . . . A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is terrific indeed!” On the other side, of course, there are the Austens, a race little given to panegyric of themselves, but nevertheless, they say, her brothers “were very fond and very proud of her. They were attached to her by her talents, her virtues, and her engaging manners, and each loved afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some niece or daughter of his own to the dear sister Jane, whose perfect equal they yet never expected to see.” Charming but perpendicular, loved at home but feared by strangers, biting of tongue but tender of heart—these contrasts are by no means incompatible, and when we turn to the novels we shall find ourselves stumbling there too over the same complexities in the writer.

To begin with, that prim little girl whom Philadelphia found so unlike a child of twelve, whimsical and affected, was soon to be the authoress of an astonishing and unchildish story, Love and Freindship,which, incredible though it appears, was written at the age of fifteen. It was written, apparently, to amuse the schoolroom; one of the stories in the same book is dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother; another is neatly illustrated with water-colour heads by her sister. These are jokes which, one feels, were family property; thrusts of satire, which went home because all little Austens made mock in common of fine ladies who “sighed and fainted on the sofa”. Brothers and sisters must have laughed when Jane read out loud her last hit at the vices which they all abhorred. “I die a martyr to my grief for the loss of Augustus. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Beware of Swoons, Dear Laura. . . . Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint. . . .” And on she rushed, as fast as she could write and quicker than she could spell, to tell the incredible adventures of Laura and Sophia, of Philander and Gustavus, of the gentleman who drove a coach between Edinburgh and Stirling every other day, of the theft of the fortune that was kept in the table drawer, of the starving mothers and the sons who acted Macbeth. Undoubtedly, the story must have roused the schoolroom to uproarious laughter. And yet, nothing is more obvious than that this girl of fifteen, sitting in her private corner of the common parlour, was writing not to draw a laugh from brother and sisters, and not for home consumption. She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own; in other words, even at that early age Jane Austen was writing. One hears it in the rhythm and shapeliness and severity of the sentences. “She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil, and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her—she was only an object of contempt.” Such a sentence is meant to outlast the Christmas holidays. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense,—Love and Freindship is all that; but what is this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world.

Girls of fifteen are always laughing. They laugh when Mr. Binney helps himself to salt instead of sugar. They almost die of laughing when old Mrs. Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying the moment after. They have no fixed abode from which they see that there is something eternally laughable in human nature, some quality in men and women that for ever excites our satire. They do not know that Lady Greville who snubs, and poor Maria who is snubbed, are permanent features of every ballroom. But Jane Austen knew it from her birth upwards. One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken her a flight through the world directly she was born. When she was laid in the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over that territory, she would covet no other. Thus at fifteen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes is finished and turned and set in its relation, not to the parsonage, but to the universe. She is impersonal; she is inscrutable. When the writer, Jane Austen, wrote down in the most remarkable sketch in the book a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there is no trace of anger at the snub which the clergyman’s daughter, Jane Austen, once received. Her gaze passes straight to the mark, and we know precisely where, upon the map of human nature, that mark is. We know because Jane Austen kept to her compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries. Never, even at the emotional age of fifteen, did she round upon herself in shame, obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have said, pointing with her stick, end THERE; and the boundary line is perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains and castles exist—on the other side. She has even one romance of her own. It is for the Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much. “One of the first characters in the world”, she called her, “a bewitching Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only ones now Mr. Whitaker, Mrs. Lefroy, Mrs. Knight and myself.” With these words her passion is neatly circumscribed, and rounded with a laugh. It is amusing to remember in what terms the young Brontë‘s wrote, not very much later, in their northern parsonage, about the Duke of Wellington.

The prim little girl grew up. She became “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly” Mrs. Mitford ever remembered, and, incidentally, the authoress of a novel called Pride and Prejudice, which, written stealthily under cover of a creaking door, lay for many years unpublished. A little later, it is thought, she began another story, The Watsons, and being for some reason dissatisfied with it, left it unfinished. The second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces. Here her difficulties are more apparent, and the method she took to overcome them less artfully concealed. To begin with, the stiffness and the bareness of the first chapters prove that she was one of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and atmosphere. How it would have been done we cannot say—by what suppressions and insertions and artful devices. But the miracle would have been accomplished; the dull history of fourteen years of family life would have been converted into another of those exquisite and apparently effortless introductions; and we should never have guessed what pages of preliminary drudgery Jane Austen forced her pen to go through. Here we perceive that she was no conjuror after all. Like other writers, she had to create the atmosphere in which her own peculiar genius could bear fruit. Here she fumbles; here she keeps us waiting. Suddenly she has done it; now things can happen as she likes things to happen. The Edwardses are going to the ball. The Tomlinsons’ carriage is passing; she can tell us that Charles is “being provided with his gloves and told to keep them on”; Tom Musgrave retreats to a remote corner with a barrel of oysters and is famously snug. Her genius is freed and active. At once our senses quicken; we are possessed with the peculiar intensity which she alone can impart. But of what is it all composed? Of a ball in a country town; a few couples meeting and taking hands in an assembly room; a little eating and drinking; and for catastrophe, a boy being snubbed by one young lady and kindly treated by another. There is no tragedy and no heroism. Yet for some reason the little scene is moving out of all proportion to its surface solemnity. We have been made to see that if Emma acted so in the ball-room, how considerate, how tender, inspired by what sincerity of feeling she would have shown herself in those graver crises of life which, as we watch her, come inevitably before our eyes. Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial. Always the stress is laid upon character. How, we are made to wonder, will Emma behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrave make their call at five minutes before three, just as Mary is bringing in the tray and the knife-case? It is an extremely awkward situation. The young men are accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma may prove herself ill-bred, vulgar, a nonentity. The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment, half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma behaves in such a way as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance. Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story, are all the elements of Jane Austen’s greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature. Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there remains, to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of human values. Dismiss this too from the mind and one can dwell with extreme satisfaction upon the more abstract art which, in the ball-room scene, so varies the emotions and proportions the parts that it is possible to enjoy it, as one enjoys poetry, for itself, and not as a link which carries the story this way and that.

But the gossip says of Jane Austen that she was perpendicular, precise, and taciturn—“a poker of whom everybody is afraid”. Of this too there are traces; she could be merciless enough; she is one of the most consistent satirists in the whole of literature. Those first angular chapters of The Watsons prove that hers was not a prolific genius; she had not, like Emily Brontë, merely to open the door to make herself felt. Humbly and gaily she collected the twigs and straws out of which the nest was to be made and placed them neatly together. The twigs and straws were a little dry and a little dusty in themselves. There was the big house and the little house; a tea party, a dinner party, and an occasional picnic; life was hedged in by valuable connections and adequate incomes; by muddy roads, wet feet, and a tendency on the part of the ladies to get tired; a little principle supported it, a little consequence, and the education commonly enjoyed by upper middle-class families living in the country. Vice, adventure, passion were left outside. But of all this prosiness, of all this littleness, she evades nothing, and nothing is slurred over. Patiently and precisely she tells us how they “made no stop anywhere till they reached Newbury, where a comfortable meal, uniting dinner and supper, wound up the enjoyments and fatigues of the day”. Nor does she pay to conventions merely the tribute of lip homage; she believes in them besides accepting them. When she is describing a clergyman, like Edmund Bertram, or a sailor, in particular, she appears debarred by the sanctity of his office from the free use of her chief tool, the comic genius, and is apt therefore to lapse into decorous panegyric or matter-of-fact description. But these are exceptions; for the most part her attitude recalls the anonymous lady’s ejaculation—“A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is terrific indeed!” She wishes neither to reform nor to annihilate; she is silent; and that is terrific indeed. One after another she creates her fools, her prigs, her worldlings, her Mr. Collinses, her Sir Walter Elliotts, her Mrs. Bennets. She encircles them with the lash of a whip-like phrase which, as it runs round them, cuts out their silhouettes for ever. But there they remain; no excuse is found for them and no mercy shown them. Nothing remains of Julia and Maria Bertram when she has done with them; Lady Bertram is left “sitting and calling to Pug and trying to keep him from the flower-beds” eternally. A divine justice is meted out; Dr. Grant, who begins by liking his goose tender, ends by bringing on “apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners in one week”. Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off. She is satisfied; she is content; she would not alter a hair on anybody’s head, or move one brick or one blade of grass in a world which provides her with such exquisite delight.

Nor, indeed, would we. For even if the pangs of outraged vanity, or the heat of moral wrath, urged us to improve away a world so full of spite, pettiness, and folly, the task is beyond our powers. People are like that—the girl of fifteen knew it; the mature woman proves it. At this very moment some Lady Bertram is trying to keep Pug from the flower beds; she sends Chapman to help Miss Fanny a little late. The discrimination is so perfect, the satire so just, that, consistent though it is, it almost escapes our notice. No touch of pettiness, no hint of spite, rouse us from our contemplation. Delight strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illumines these fools.

That elusive quality is, indeed, often made up of very different parts, which it needs a peculiar genius to bring together. The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool, her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of sanity and sense which she has in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts a Mary Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten thousand a year, with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings flat. Hence the depth, the beauty, the complexity of her scenes. From such contrasts there comes a beauty, a solemnity even, which are not only as remarkable as her wit, but an inseparable part of it. In The Watsons she gives us a foretaste of this power; she makes us wonder why an ordinary act of kindness, as she describes it, becomes so full of meaning. In her masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection. Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop, in which all the happiness of life has collected, gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.

What more natural, then, with this insight into their profundity, than that Jane Austen should have chosen to write of the trivialities of day-to-day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances? No “suggestions to alter her style of writing” from the Prince Regent or Mr. Clarke could tempt her; no romance, no adventure, no politics or intrigue could hold a candle to life on a country-house staircase as she saw it. Indeed, the Prince Regent and his librarian had run their heads against a very formidable obstacle; they were trying to tamper with an incorruptible conscience, to disturb an infallible discretion. The child who formed her sentences so finely when she was fifteen never ceased to form them, and never wrote for the Prince Regent or his Librarian, but for the world at large. She knew exactly what her powers were, and what material they were fitted to deal with as material should be dealt with by a writer whose standard of finality was high. There were impressions that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice could be properly coated and covered by her own resources. For example, she could not make a girl talk enthusiastically of banners and chapels. She could not throw herself whole-heartedly into a romantic moment. She had all sorts of devices for evading scenes of passion. Nature and its beauties she approached in a sidelong way of her own. She describes a beautiful night without once mentioning the moon. Nevertheless, as we read the few formal phrases about “the brilliancy of an unclouded night and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods”, the night is at once as “solemn, and soothing, and lovely” as she tells us, quite simply, that it was.

The balance of her gifts was singularly perfect. Among her finished novels there are no failures, and among her many chapters few that sink markedly below the level of the others. But, after all, she died at the age of forty-two. She died at the height of her powers. She was still subject to those changes which often make the final period of a writer’s career the most interesting of all. Vivacious, irrepressible, gifted with an invention of great vitality, there can be no doubt that she would have written more, had she lived, and it is tempting to consider whether she would not have written differently. The boundaries were marked; moons, mountains, and castles lay on the other side. But was she not sometimes tempted to trespass for a minute? Was she not beginning, in her own gay and brilliant manner, to contemplate a little voyage of discovery?

Let us take Persuasion, the last completed novel, and look by its light at the books she might have written had she lived. There is a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in Persuasion. The dullness is that which so often marks the transition stage between two different periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly. There is an asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobbery of a Miss Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not altogether on her object. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in Persuasion, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and insist that it was “the most beautiful of her works”. She is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of Anne: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning”. She dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of nature, upon the autumn where she had been wont to dwell upon the spring. She talks of the “influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal months in the country”. She marks “the tawny leaves and withered hedges”. “One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it”, she observes. But it is not only in a new sensibility to nature that we detect the change. Her attitude to life itself is altered. She is seeing it, for the greater part of the book, through the eyes of a woman who, unhappy herself, has a special sympathy for the happiness and unhappiness of others, which, until the very end, she is forced to comment upon in silence. Therefore the observation is less of facts and more of feelings than is usual. There is an expressed emotion in the scene at the concert and in the famous talk about woman’s constancy which proves not merely the biographical fact that Jane Austen had loved, but the aesthetic fact that she was no longer afraid to say so. Experience, when it was of a serious kind, had to sink very deep, and to be thoroughly disinfected by the passage of time, before she allowed herself to deal with it in fiction. But now, in 1817, she was ready. Outwardly, too, in her circumstances, a change was imminent. Her fame had grown very slowly. “I doubt”, wrote Mr. Austen Leigh, “whether it would be possible to mention any other author of note whose personal obscurity was so complete.” Had she lived a few more years only, all that would have been altered. She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure.

And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion, or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of publishers or the flattery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity. But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less (this is already perceptible in Persuasion) to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvellous little speeches which sum up, in a few minutes’ chatter, all that we need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove for ever, that shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but what life is. She would have stood farther away from her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal, died “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success”.

- This essay Jane Austen was published in Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader (First Series) 1925.

I’m so chuffed to find that three of the Northanger Canon titles have made their way onto Valancourt Books‘ bestsellers list for 2008.

The Northanger Canon is a selection of 18th century Gothic fiction immortalized by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Other than the two Radcliffe works, the ‘horrid novels’ were belived to be a delightfully adsurd fabrication of Austen’s until the early 20th century. Valancourt Books publishes six of the Canon titles:

The other titles of the Canon are The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe 1794, Horrid Mysteries: A Story From the German Of The Marquis Of Grosse by Peter Will 1796, Clermont 1798 by Regina Maria Roche and Orphan of the Rhine by Eleanor Sleath 1798.

Anyone interested in taking up a course of important Gothic reading would have to include on their book list:

1. The original Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto 1764
2. Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story 1777 [Reprinted as The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story]
3. Vathek by William Beckford 1786
4. The Adventures of Caleb Williams 1794 by William Godwin (father of Mary Shelley), often describedy as the first detective novel
5. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe 1794
6. Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk 1796
7. The poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written 1797-1798 by Samuel Taylor Colridge
8. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen 1798 (published 1817)
9. John Polidori’s The Vampyre 1816
10. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley 1818
11. John Keats’ poems La Belle Dame Sans Merci 1819 and The Eve of St Agnes 1820

Shelley’s Frankenstein of course stands out on this list, the moral and philosophical probing of the novel is still branded on our culture today. Frankenstein is the single most important product of the Horror tradition, but it considerably transcends its sources.

As cruely overlooked by literary consensus as he was in life, John Polidori was a very good writer who’s few works are obscured by the long shadows cast by his Diodati associates, the Shelleys and Lord Byron. The Vampyre, when at all mentioned, is noted for featuring the first vampire who is humanesque: an alluring, sexual aristocrat modeled on Lord Byron. This vampire, Lord Ruthven, was not only the all important pre-cursor to J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla 1872 and Bram Stoker’s Dracula 1897, he defined the vampire as we know him today. But far more importantly, Polidori brought an intellectual, a rational conclusion to the Gothic novel. When Lord Ruthven is finally finished off with pistol and bullet, it is human morality, rationality and strength that has saved the day, and not a form of mysterious, supernatural comeuppance.

Lewis’ The Monk has been cited by many as a superior work to Walpole’s. The Marquis de Sade, who among other attributes was a masterful critic, did rate it the superior and stated that the Gothic culture was ‘the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded’ in his 1800 work Reflections on the Novel.

Thirty years after Walpole created a framework for terror, the discontented rumblings of Georgain British society and the horrors of  the French Revolution and The Terror  slowlybut surly worked their way into fiction.

Gothic Bath 1810 Jean-Baptiste Mallet, Château-Musée de Dieppe

Valancourt Books is an independent micro press specializing inquality new editions of rare literature from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. I think the boys say it best themselves: ‘Valancourt Classics seeks out unjustly forgotten literary classics and makes them newly available in annotated scholarly editions.’

Related on (Grey Pony): Sublime Anxiety: the Northanger Canon ; Austen and the Picturesque Part III ; The Diodati Authors and their Stories