Cooking Up a Story: Jane West, Prudentia Homespun, and the Consumption of Fiction

Abstract

Cooking Up a Story:Jane West, Pmdentia Homespun, and the Consumption of Fiction David Thame TJ ec JXa ecovering from the weekend visit of a boisterous nephew,Jane usten wrote to Cassandra: I enjoyed Edward's companyvery much, & yet I was not sorrywhen friday came ... I often wonder how you can find time for what you do, in addition to the care ofdie House;—And how good Mrs West could have written such Books & collected so many hard words, with all her family cares, is still a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full ofJoints ofmuttons & doses ofrhubarb.1 Jane West (1758-1852) had published her last novel two years before Austen wrote this letter and did not publish again until afterAusten's death, yet a powerful image remained: West producing food and fiction. Of course food here, as so often, serves as a metonym for domesticity and its trials, but the association of food and fiction in 1 JaneAusten's Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 321. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 2,January 2004 218 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION West's work may have given rise to Austen's casual remark. That association, in turn, may help throw new light on the struggle of women writers for literary authority in the decades that conclusively established the nineteenth-century realist novel as serious and respectable.2Awiderpolemic purpose for this article is the old call of adfontes? The valuable feministscholarship ofthe last three decades has resurrected as viable subjects ofinquiry many hitherto forgotten women writers, including West, but the body of work of these neglected women novelists has not been resurrected whole: limbs are missing. Many ofthe works ofwriters such as West, Amelia Opie, and Sydney Owenson remain unread, while the handful selected (for whatever reasons) for facsimile reprints or modern editions are treated to relatively lavish and disproportionate attention. The picture changes once West's later (unreprinted) novels—TheRefusal (1810), TheLoyalists {1812), and Alicia deLacy (1814)—are reintegrated into accounts of her work.4 No doubt the preparation and consumption offood weighed heavily on West's mind as it would on any diligent housekeeper in the days before supermarkets and refrigeration, and, not surprisingly, the composition of meals and of tales came to mingle in West's imagination. In her poem "To the Hon. Mrs C-E," West wrote: "You said the author was a charmer, / Self-taught, and married to a farmer; / Who wrote all kinds ofverse widi ease, / Made pies and puddings, frocks and cheese."5In 1802, arare beam ofpublicityilluminatedWest's 2 Ina Ferris, TheAchievement ofLiteraryAutliority: Gender, History and tlie WaverleyNovels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 3 Richard F. Hamilton, VieSocialMisconstruction ofReahty: Validity and Verification in tlieScliolarly Community (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). I have already attempted somethingsimilarforAmelia Opie: David Thame, "Amelia Opie's Maniacs," Women's Writing 7 (2000), 309-26. 4 Jane West, TheAdvantages ofEducation, or, VieHistory ofMaria Williams, A TaleforMisses and TheirMammas (AE), 2 vols (London, 1793);West,/i Gossip'sStory, anda Legendary Tale (GS), 2 vols (London, 1796);West, A Taleoftlie Times (TT), 3 vols (London, 1799);West, Thelnfidel Father (IF), 3vols (London, 1802);West, TheRefusal (R), 3 vols (London, 1810); [West], Vie Loyalists: An Historical Novel (L), 3 vols (London, 1812); West, Alicia de Lacy, An Historical Romance (A de L), 4 vols (London, 1814). References are to these editions. 5 West, "To die Hon. Mrs. C-E" (1791), Miscellaneous Poems, and A Tragedy (York, 1791), pp. 115-21. For West's life, see Pamela Wilder Lloyd's invaluable "Jane West: A Critical COOKING UP ASTORY 219 private life, and that controversyalso revolved around the extent ofthe novelist's dailyinvolvementwith kitchen business.6Farfrom finding die publicity irksome and demeaning, as some of her friends supposed, Westwasdelightedand lookedforward to increased consumption ofher novels, "considering every discussion concerning me as likely to promote me saleofmyworkwhich is the great object I have in view."7 West's cheerfully commercial attitude to writing—a task expliciüy associated with food since she wrote to help feed her family, satisfying the appetites of readers in an effort to satisfy the appetites of her children—will serve as...