Austen's Letters Research Articles

The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes by Devoney Looser, and: Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen by Sheila Johnson Kindred

Reviewed by: The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes by Devoney Looser, and: Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen by Sheila Johnson Kindred Misty Krueger Devoney Looser, The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2019). Pp. 200. $14.00 paperback. Sheila Johnson Kindred, Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 2017). Pp. 291; 24 color illus., 10 b/w illus., 1 map. $34.95 CAD cloth. Jane Austen is one of the most quoted and misquoted authors to write in the English language. She has a seat at the (mis)quotation table alongside literary giants such as Charles Dickens and Henry Melville, as Devoney Looser reminds us in her foreword to The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes. How many people have quoted the famed beginning from Pride and Prejudice to fit their needs? Many, including Looser, who begins her foreword by encouraging readers to think about the act of quoting Austen: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that you could put almost anything in the second half of this sentence" (v). Fittingly, the book's daybook-like offering of daily Austen quotations also begins with this opening from the beloved novel. Each new month of the book is prefaced by a longer passage from one of Austen's novels—most coming from Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion—and then, for each day of the month, Looser provides a short excerpt from Austen's novels, juvenilia, and letters. Some of these entries quote brief dialogue from these works; some, just a witty line or two; and some, a paragraph or more. The book ends with a handy index for readers who want to search for their favorite novels or compare the quotations provided from particular works. The Daily Jane Austen enters a longstanding tradition of daily literary quotation books, but Looser's thoughtful foreword reminds us that there is more to the art of editing such a volume than randomly choosing great lines from great works. The editor of such a collection must think about what happens when we take quotations out of context and how readers understand Austen's language as stand-alone witticisms when there is literally and figuratively much more to the story. The editor must keep in mind, as the Austen reader should, that there are [End Page 491] many ways to read an Austen passage. Looser is correct, then, to remind us that even when we think we know what Austen means in any perhaps-familiar paragraph, her lines "deserve greater scrutiny" (vii). As Looser points out, quoting Austen is "a surprisingly fraught exercise" because every line should be read contextually to determine if the writer's "prose is laudable, laughable, or lamentable" (x). Sometimes Austen is making a joke. Sometimes she intends for the reader to question the characters she mocks, such as Caroline Bingley or Mrs. Elton when they insincerely speak words that sound good. As Looser notes, Austen citation is problematic in this way even for the Bank of England, which, on its latest ten-pound note, quotes Caroline on the act of reading and misses the remark's ironic context. Quoting the narrator or one of Austen's protagonists is not the same as quoting an antagonist. A pleasure perhaps indirectly offered by The Daily Austen is the opportunity it provides to think again about the notorious misquotation of Austen's works, without proper consideration of the original context—and the equally rampant misattribution of witticisms to her, as in the frequent instances when lines spoken in contemporary films are credited to her. Before reading all of the wonderful quotations shared in Looser's book, the reader is poised to learn a great deal from the foreword. It is a gem both for its guidance in thinking about the act of Austen quotation and for its contextualization of quotation as an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century practice. We know that Austen read books of extracts, such as Vicesimus Knox's 1780s Elegant Extracts, and that she liked to quote from authors in her letters...

‘What Edward promises he will perform’: ‘How to do things with words’ in Sense and Sensibility

A recent denigrating essay on Jane Austen1 rehearses charges more or less forgotten in her recent recrudescence as an ironic icon of ‘popular culture’. The tally of points against suggests that if ...

Lord Brabourne's edition of Jane Austen's letters

On 14 October 1949 the late Mr T. Edward Carpenter, founder of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, bought from Maggs Bros., for ?21. Os. Od., a group of fourteen letters written to the publishing firm of Richard Bentley & Son by the first Lord Brabourne during the years 1883-5. These letters are preserved in the Trust's archives, at Jane Austen's house in Chawton, and thanks to the kindness of the present head of the Trust, Mr Tom Carpenter, I was able to study them during the summer of 1999. As the manuscripts throw some very interesting sidelights upon Lord Brabourne's edition of the Letters of Jane Austen, which was published in two volumes by Bentley late in 1884, it seems desirable that they should be transcribed and published in their entirety. Lord Brabourne's diaries for these three years1 also provide information as to the progress of his work on the Letters, and extracts from them will be interpolated as appropriate. Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen (1829-93) was a great-nephew of Jane Austen, being the eldest son of her niece, Fanny Knight of Godmersham, by the latter's marriage in 1820 to Sir Edward Knatchbull, bt. Like his father, he made his career in politics, and was raised to the peerage by Gladstone as baron Brabourne in 1880. Apart from the publication of some of his political speeches, his previous literary efforts had been confined to writing fairytales-originally for his own children-sixteen volumes of which were published between 1869 and 1887. His biographer in the DNB commented that in this capacity he 'failed to distinguish himself', though his stories 'pleased the uncritical readers for whom they were produced'.2

Prejudice in Jane Austen, Emma Tennant, Charles Dickens--and Us

In one of the treasure troves that the internet habitually throws off these days, the AUSTENLIST itemizes sixty-eightJane Austen literary reversions (including eight of and Prejudice) written between 1850 and 2000.1 Most are sequels to the novels or a given novel's action seen from a minor character's point of view, but there are also such oddities as a re-creation of Austen's letters in rhyme royal, a postscript to Persuasion with a choice of endings 'a la The French Lieutenant's Woman, a play aboutJane's mysterious seaside romance, a novel about Antipodes Jane and her doings down under in Australia, and, just in 1996, the first of three planned novels aboutJane Austen, detective. Of course, I was not tempted to read any of the lot in my life's short day of frost and sun, especially since most seem to be byjaneite enthusiasts of one stripe or another-and since this is intended to be an essay on the nature of prejudice, I must admit, male academic professional that I am, that I am casually, but no doubt unfairly, prejudiced against the sort of arch and nostalgically genteel thing such a society of Austen fans turns out. Or so, mostly, I have heard. For, like all prejudices, this one is based, if not upon total ignorance, then at least upon hearsay and a fairly limited sampling of evidence, after which the soul, having selected its society, snaps shut the valves of its attention pretty securely. Still, there was at least one writer on the Austen list, Emma Tennant, to whom that prejudice did not apply, for I had read and liked her 1978 reversion of Sir Walter Scott's Heart ofMidlothian entitled The Bad Sister. I consequently decided to give Tennant's 1993 novel, Pemberley. Or Pride and Prejudice Continued, and her 1994 novel, An Unequal Marriage. Or Pride and Prejudice Twenty Years Later,2 a try, to see whether and how

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Jane Austen's Letters Collected and edited by DEIRDRE LE FAYE Third edition Pp xxviii+644Oxford and New York Oxford University Press, 1995 £30 APRIL LONDON APRIL LONDON University of Ottawa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XLVIII, Issue 190, May 1997, Pages 266–267, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLVIII.190.266 Published: 01 May 1997

Word length analysis of Jane Austen's letters

Abstract This paper deals with word length in twenty of Jane Austen's letters and is part of a research project performed in Gottingen. Word length in English has so far only been studied in the context of contemporary texts (Hasse & Weinbrenner, 1995; Riedemann, 1994) and in the English dictionary (Rothschild, 1986). It has been ascertained that word length in texts abides by a law having the form of the mixed Poisson distribution ‐an assumption which in a language like English can easily be justified. However, in special texts other regularities can arise. Individual or genre‐like factors can induce a systematic deviation in one or more frequency classes. We say that the phenomenon is on the way to another attractor. The first remedy in such cases is a local modification of the given frequency classes; the last remedy is the search for another model.

Jane Austen's letters

Jane Austen's letters

Jane Austen and the Clergy (review)

REVIEWS 213 agricole bien tempéré, adaptation de l'encadrement normatif aux conditions concrètes, eudémonisme ("Patrie, Famille, Travail"?) commun à chefs de maison et gouvernants. "Believing that man is constituted by and within his relationships" (p. 249), le spiritualisme de Rousseau n'exclut pas un matérialisme personnaliste qui approfondit celui "du sage." D'autres bons essais de S.L. Arico, M.A. Butler, Ph. Knee, E.H. Lemay, et J. Roussel complètent ce recueil stimulant. William Acher Paris Irene Collins. Jane Austen and the Clergy. London: Hambledon Press, 1993. xii + 242pp. US$40.00. ISBN 1-85285-114-7. An accomplished historian, Irene Collins has written a book which, though full of details about the clergy, is bound to disappoint readers trained as literary critics. Simply put, there is more material here on the clergy than on Jane Austen's novels, which are often brought into the discussion to support or illustrate observations about patronage, the parson's education, the parson's income, the parson's dwelling, the country parish, and several other topics dealt with in the eleven chapters of the book. Indeed, the titles of these chapters—some of which I have cited in my previous sentence—indicate that the focus of this study is not so much on Jane Austen as—to borrow the title of the first chapter—on her "clerical connections." These "clerical connections" are treated in exemplary fashion. Collins is a meticulous gatherer of facts and the narrative in which she conveys those facts is both graceful and engaging. At times, however, the facts are presented for their own sake rather than to illuminate a particular facet ofJane Austen's novelistic practice. For example, in the midst of a lengthy discussion of curates and parsons in relation to fixed stipends and tithes, Collins admits that "for reasons which can only be conjectured, this aspect of a parson's situation impinged so little upon Jane Austen's consciousness that it never figures in her letters and novels" (p. 50). It is clear that, to present an accurate and complete picture of the clergy in Austen's time, Collins must deal with this topic. But when she refuses to speculate on the reasons why this topic "never figures" in Austen's letters and novels, she disappoints the literary critic to whom such silences speak eloquently. The failure to pursue connections beyond mere juxtaposition is evident throughout the book and can best be illustrated by examining a representative paragraph. Found in the fifth chapter, on the parson's dwelling, this paragraph begins by establishing a connection with the historical Jane Austen: "With John Rawstorne Papillon also pulling down a parsonage house and building a new one at Chawton in 1804, Jane Austen was clearly accustomed to 'improvement,' which was the fashionable gentlemanly occupation of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." Collins then proceeds to make a connection with a passage from Sense and Sensibility: "Like all movements it had its own vocabulary and its own specialized publications, which she [Austen] drew upon when she described Mrs. Dashwood's plans for improving her four-bedroomed cottage at Barton." After citing the passage from Sense and Sensibility, which deals with expanding parlours and widening stairs, Collins moves on to windows, which, as she puts it, "were especially vulnerable to change. Small leaded casements were ripped out during the eighteenth century in favour of the double-sash: an advertisement for the sale of the living 214 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:2 of Camerton in 1800 announced proudly that all the upper windows of the rectorial house were sashed." From sashes we are transported to Gothicism: "At the same time— although it was to be some years before John Buonarotti Papworth, the fashionable villa architect, declared Gothic to be the most appropriate style for parsonages—Gothicism was creeping into the design of windows." After a few words on sashes and Gothicism in connection with the Reverend James Skinner and Camerton, we are once again returned to the historical Jane Austen: "The curious hybrid known as a sashed Gothic window was among the improvements Edward made to the house he provided for his mothers and sisters at Chawton" (p...

Vies et images maternelles dans la littérature française du dix-huitième siècle (review)

100 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:1 patriarchal culture. The "fantasy" of powerful female networks in Lady Susan and the equivocal presentation of female friendship as a positive alternative to marriage in The Watsons are denied, she argues, in Pride and Prejudice, where "Elizabeth Bennet's bold talking stands in for a community of female voices—and points us towards its absence" (p. 196). Kaplan's readings of the novels are often suggestive, and her insistence that Lady Susan and The Watsons are Austen's "most daring and experimental" works (p. 154) is persuasive. But it is in this section, and particularly in trying to account for this perceived shift in the fiction, that the more myopic aspects of Kaplan's methodology and range of reference become most apparent. When Austen's letters fail to provide her with an explanation for the shift to greater conventionality in Pride and Prejudice, Kaplan has to resort to the suggestion that it must be attributable to Austen's move from "private" to "public" writing. But "public" here remains largely undefined, a reification of the separate spheres which elsewhere Kaplan has tried to problematize. What her microhistorical method fails even to acknowledge is the possibility that the wider political debates of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period might inform not simply women's fiction, but also Austen's "two cultures." Claudia Johnson's recent book Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (1988), a subtle examination of Austen's novels in the context of 1790s fiction and the revolution debate, would be the obvious referent here. But Kaplan mentions Johnson only in passing, unfairly dismissing her as yet another example of American feminist criticism's wilful celebration of female experience. Kaplan presents herself as "making a case" for a literary criticism that is "both feminist and historically grounded" (p. 183). For feminist critics of Austen working within a British tradition—and, indeed, to many Americans, besides Johnson—this is hardly the daring claim she seems to assume it to be. In her eagerness to criticize American feminism 's naive championing of the "female voice" (a critique which in some cases, it must be said, is nevertheless justified), Kaplan ignores or misrepresents work on Austen which one might have expected her to recognize as either allied with, or at least relevant to, her own project. Marilyn Butler's Jane Austen and the War of Ideas is never mentioned; nor is the work of Janet Todd. Perhaps what is at stake here is the definition of "historical grounding." Kaplan's concern, as I have said, is with accessing the "specific social circumstances" of women's "differing experiences of subordination" (p. 14), and her account of how members of Austen's female community negotiated the constraints of gender is scrupulous and suggestive. But what the book lacks, in spite of its initial stress on contingency and historical change, is any sense of the complex discursive context which might reveal those negotiations as part of a wider social process. Vivien Jones University of Leeds Isabelle Brouard-Arends. Vies et images maternelles dans la littératurefrançaise du dix-huitième siècle. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no. 291. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1991. ix + 465pp. ISBN 0-7294-0428-5. Isabelle Brouard-Arends has undertaken a very ambitious study, which includes medical and moral discourse, the novel, and theatre. Each genre is represented by a large number of works, including famous authors as well as lesser-known ones. She finds that eighteenth-century medical discourse, on the pretext of protecting the mother's health, deprives her of all responsibility. The widespread custom of sending REVIEWS 101 children out to nurse separated mother and child, and a legal system that held the bond of father and child to be more important than that of mother and child contributed to "une méfiance qui empoisonne durablement" the mother-child relationship (p. 106). In literary works written during the first part of the century, the mother is often absent or only briefly mentioned, and little interest is shown in the child. According to BrouardArends , there are relatively few mothers in French literature before about 1730, and those who appear...

Jane Austen's Letters: The Date of No. 149

Jane Austen's Letters: The Date of No. 149

Some Errors and Omissions in the Indexes to Jane Austen's Letters

Some Errors and Omissions in the Indexes to Jane Austen's Letters

Reading Pride and Prejudice

Reading Pride and PrejudicePatricia Howell Michaelson In his "Biographical Notice" of Jane Austen, her brother Henry wrote, "She read aloud with very great taste and effect. Her own works, probably , were never heard to so much advantage as from her own mouth; for she partook largely in all the best gifts of the comic muse."1 Henry was not the only witness to praise Austen's skill as à reader, and her pleasure in reading aloud is hinted at by die numerous descriptions of readings in her novels and letters. When die first copy of Pride and Prejudice arrived from die printer, tiiough they had a guest, die Austens "set fairly at it, and read half die first vol. to her." Perhaps Jane was reading diat night, for she was certainly happy with the performance. A week later, though, she wrote, "Our second evening's reading to Miss Benn had not pleased me so well, but I believe something must be attributed to my mother's too rapid way of getting on: though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought."2 A fine reader herself, a frequent one, and one widi decided notions of what constitutes excellence, Austen almost certainly wrote her novels anticipating that they would be read aloud. This paper will examine the ways 1 The Novels ofJane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman, 3rd edition, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), V, 7. References are to this edition. 2 Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R.W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 297, 299. This was not the first family reading of Pride and Prejudice: Jane had read the first draft of the novel, secretly, to Cassandra. See William AustenLeigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, 2nd ed. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), p. 73. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 3, Number 1, October 1990 66 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION in which the performance practice of reading informs important aspects of Pride and Prejudice? Austen's criticism of her mother's reading reflects concerns that were common in the many contemporary treatises on reading aloud. Since 1748, die publication date of John Mason's Essay on Elocution, or Pronunciation , reading aloud had been widely discussed. The early elocutionists directed dieir remarks at speakers in the senate, the pulpit, and the bar; they argued against the use of artificial "reading tones"—fixed patterns of intonation taught in the schools—and in favour of a more natural reading style that would better express the sense of a text. Other elocutionists devoted attention to the expression not only of sense, but of emotion. An essay by James Burgh, with specific instructions on how to express emotions such as mirth, anger, or denial, was reprinted in many schoolbooks, as were pieces by Mason, James Walker, and Hugh Blair. In fact, most school anthologies were prefaced by instructions for reading aloud.4 By the end of die eighteenth century, the elocution movement had widened its audience to include virtually any reader. Austen may have learned about elocution at home. Her fatiier, also considered an excellent reader, was a clergyman, a member of the elocutionists ' original target audience; to supplement his income he took in students, and may well have used one of the popular andiologies. Austen herself undoubtedly knew of die elocutionists, for she refers to die elocution movement in Mansfield Park (p. 339), in the context of reading in the pulpit. In Northanger Abbey (p. 108), she mentions Hugh Blair, in a passage Chapman believes refers to Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). One of these lectures, "On Pronunciation, or Delivery ," was reprinted as an introduction to Elegant Extracts, the anthology 3 I borrow the term "performance practice" from musicology, where it "encompass[es] everything about performance that is not unambiguously specified in notation," that is, "the gap between what was notated and what was thought necessary for a performance." See Don Michael Randel, ed., 77ie New Harvard Dictionary ofMusic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 624. 4 William Enfield included his own "Essay on Elocution" as die introduction to his widely used anthology...

A "Sweet Face as White as Death": Jane Austen and the Politics of Female Sensibility

The subject of this essay is dead women, and how dead women serve the community that gathers around to encourage them while they dwindle away slowly or pop off (as Tom Bertram might say) with precipitous finality.1 For Janeites, who celebrate Austen as the arbitress of good breeding, no topic could appear less suitable than dying women. Or dying anything. If unpleasantnesssuch as poverty, alcoholism, politics-finds no haven in Austen's prim parlors, how much less welcome death itself? Considered in this light, Austen's reputed unwillingness to depict death is not a failure of ambition or imagination, but rather a triumph of decorum. But to readers of the subversive school, who regard Austen as an arch-ironist, the case stands differently. As they see it, far from maintaining a ladylike reticence about subjects as deep or discomforting as death, Austen if anything talks about the subject too often and with a shockingly unladylike failure of feeling. Marvin Mudrick-who still sets the terms of so much Austen commentary-roots out the references to death in Austen's Letters and novels and takes her to task for what he calls the offhand

An Allusion to “Sir Charles Grandison” in Jane Austen's Letters

An Allusion to “Sir Charles Grandison” in Jane Austen's Letters Get access Elaine Noel-Bentley Elaine Noel-Bentley University of Manitoba, Winnipeg Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 24, Issue 4, 7-8 1977, Page 321, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/24.4.321 Published: 01 January 1977

New Verses by Jane Austen

Research Article| December 01 1975 New Verses by Jane Austen Donald Greene Donald Greene Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1975) 30 (3): 257–260. https://doi.org/10.2307/2933069 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Donald Greene; New Verses by Jane Austen. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 December 1975; 30 (3): 257–260. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2933069 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1975 By The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Costume of Jane Austen and Her Characters

Jane Austen's letters were published in a collected edition in 1932, edited by Dr. R.W. Chapman. Some of them and many parts of them had been known for years from the Memoir by J. Austen-Leigh (1870); from Lord Brabourne's publication of letters in his possession, Letters of Jane Austen (1884); and from The Life and Letters of Jane Austen by W. and R.A. Austen-Leigh (1913); but this edition gave, for the first time, the full text of all known letters.

Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others

Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others

Jane Austen's letters : bilbocatch

Journal Article Jane Austen's letters : bilbocatch Get access A. Hall A. Hall Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s6-XI, Issue 283, 20 May 1885, Page 432, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s6-XI.283.432f Published: 30 May 1885