Month: June 2020

Bill curates: Jane Austen’s letters, 1814-1816

/ Whispering Gums / 21 Comments

Bill curates is an occasional series where I delve into Sue’s vast archive, stretching back to May 2009, and choose a post for us to revisit.

Book coverI said, when I introduced this series, that Sue began writing Whispering Gums in May 2009. It seems that once begun she could not stop. There are WG posts for May 2,4,5,6,10,14,15,16,19,21,22,27,28,30,31. The May 31 post is titled, prophetically, “When too much Jane Austen is barely enough”, and is in fact the third Jane Austen post for the month. Today I reprise the second. But there will be more.

Diedre Le Faye ed., Jane Austen’s Letters, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014

More Jane Austen from Whispering Gums (here)

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My original post

By 1814, Jane Austen had published Sense and sensibility (1811) and Pride and prejudice (1813).  Mansfield Park (1814) was about to be published, and Northanger Abbey had been written many years previously but was not yet published. She was over half way through her major published oeuvre of 6 books and had less than 4 years to live. Tragedy!

Jane Austen's desk with quill

Austen’s desk, Chawton. (Courtesy: Monster @ flickr.com)

There have been several editions of her letters, the most recent being Jane Austen’s letters, published in 1995 and edited by Jane Austen scholar, Deirdre Le Faye. Of the estimated 3000 letters she wrote, only about 160 survive so it is well to savour them slowly. I have just (re)read the letters from 1814 to 1816, and found much to delight a Janeite. They contain some of her most famous quotes regarding her subject-matter and style, advice to her nieces on novel-writing, criticisms of other writing which provide insight into her own writing, as well as a lot of detail about her daily life.

One of her most famous comments was made to her niece Anna (nèe Austen) Lefroy in September 1814:

You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life – 3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.

Somewhat less well known is her response to James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent’s chaplain and librarian, who suggested she write a novel about an English Clergyman. She writes:

The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the Good, the Enthusiastic, the Literary. Such a Man’s conversation must at times be on subjects of Science & Philosophy of which I know nothing  […] A Classical Education, or at any rate, a very extensive acquaintance with English Literature, Ancient and Modern, appears to me quite Indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your Clergyman. And I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible Vanity, the most unlearned, & uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress. (December 1815)

False modesty perhaps, but she she knew what she was comfortable writing and this was not it. She makes clear in her letters exactly what she thinks makes good writing and one of those things is to write what you know. She tells Anna that it is fine to let some characters go to Ireland but not to describe their time there “as you know nothing of the Manners there” (August 1814). Interestingly, it would have been around this time that she was writing Emma – some of whose characters go to Ireland but no details are given of their life there. She also tells Anna that fiction must appear to be realistic as well as be realistic when she says:

I have scratched out Sir Tho: from walking with the other Men to the Stables &c the very day after his breaking his arm – for though I find your Papa did walk out immediately after his arm was set, I think it can be so little usual as to appear unnatural in a book. (August 1814)

In other words, truth is allowed to be stranger than fiction!

In the September 1814 letter referred to earlier, she advises Anna to keep her characters consistent, and to be careful about providing too “minute” descriptions.  And in another letter written that same September she warns Anna off “common Novel style” such as creating a character who is “a handsome, amiable, unexceptionable Young Man (such as do not much abound in real Life)” and to not have a character “plunge into a ‘vortex of Dissipation’ … it is such thorough novel slang – and so old, that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened”!

There is a lot in these letters – about writing and getting published, the weather, fashion, health, and the like. However, in the interests of brevity I will close with something completely different but which, given the current popularity of Christos Tsiolkas’ The slap, seems very apposite. She writes this in 1815 about a young boy of her acquaintance: “we thought him a very fine boy, but in terrible want of Discipline – I hope he gets a wholesome thump, or two, whenever it is necessary”. If Jane thinks it’s a good idea, who are we to argue?

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When Bill offered this series to help me out, he said he’d start with Eve Langley’s The pea pickers, which he did. I wondered what he would choose next, but I should have guessed that he would have turned to another favourite that we share, Jane Austen.

We’d love all you other Austenites to show yourselves and tell us what you most love about her.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest post from Lisa on national library book culls

/ Whispering Gums / 27 Comments
As I noted in last week’s Monday Musings, Bill (The Australian Legend) has organised a few Monday Musings guests posts for me. Of course, given we comment closely on each other’s posts, he turned to Lisa (ANZLitLovers) for the second one. Bill did suggest an idea to Lisa, in case she needed it, but she found another topic to inspire her. It is a highly relevant one to me as a retired national institution librarian/archivist, so I was more than happy with her suggestion.
Thanks so much again to Bill and Lisa for helping me out and for offering some wonderful new content for Monday Musings.  Read on … and do let us know what you think …

Lisa’s post

Last year, when in New Zealand for the Auckland Writers’ Festival, I visited the Auckland Art Gallery, and was disappointed to find its ’Historic European’ Gallery closed.  From the postcards on sale in the shop we could see that they had some very interesting pieces, so we were a bit disappointed. But at the time we just thought this meant they had stopped collecting European art.  However, from a recent visit to their website, it’s clear that European art has been sidelined.  If you want to see New Zealand and Pacific art, this gallery is the place to go.  But if on the other hand you are a Kiwi student of art history, or merely curious about New Zealand’s international collection as we were…

I thought of this when I came across a more radical policy underway in the New Zealand National Library. In October last year the library announced that they are going to ‘rehome’ 600,000 books to make room for New Zealand and Pacific material, in line with their 2015 Collections Policy.

Yes, that’s right, 600,000 books!

Behind the scenes, libraries have all kinds of policies that affect their acquisitions and deaccessions procedures.  These rarely attract much interest from the public, except for the issue of censorship, or ‘self-censorship’ of certain types of books. (As, for example, when a school library unofficially responds to complaints from religious minorities by not lending books featuring magic such as the Harry Potter series).

Acquisitions and deaccession policies reflect a variety of complex issues which change over time.  No collection is static, and space for underutilised materials is always a problem.

The New Zealand library’s Rachel Esson (Director of Content Services) explains their decision like this:

The overseas published collection is not one single collection but is made up of an assortment of books acquired from a range of sources, some were purchased and some donated to us having been weeded from other libraries. These books were collected to support the library system, to provide access to information that other libraries might not hold. However, around 80% of them have not been issued for 20-30 years which means most of these books are not being used and that means that the library system is telling us that it doesn’t need these books anymore.

To be clear, they are keeping some overseas published books and will continue to purchase more for their collections in focussed areas, which include: library and information science; music; reference works; children’s literature; family history, and print disabilities.

But the removal of 600,000 books is needed to make room for New Zealand and Pacific Materials:

The National Library acquires between 80,000 – 90,000 electronic and print publications a year that consist of New Zealand, Pacific and overseas material.

That makes sense to me, because New Zealand is a wealthy nation and is in a position to be a centre of excellence for the literature of Pacific Island nations which may not have the resources to do it themselves.

But as I know from my own experience as a teacher-librarian, undertaking a cull of underutilised books can be a fraught exercise, because there is always someone who, for sentimental or research reasons, needs that battered copy of a text that seems past its use-by date.  At the same time there will always be people who want to cut a swathe through the entire collection to rid it of books that offend them for one reason or another.  In the feminist Seventies, for instance, there was alarm about the preponderance of male central characters in library collections of children’s literature, and that’s still a problem today.  So is the paucity of characters reflecting Australia’s multiculturalism, its Indigenous past and present, and its LGBTIQ and disabled communities…

The philosophy of inclusion is comparatively new and it keeps changing.  Difficult decisions have to be made around those innocuous words ‘as well as’, ‘instead of’ and ‘proportion’ because these decisions have implication for space, storage, display and especially funding.

For most libraries, the decision to acquire or get rid of a book to make space for others is a decision for the local community and the users.  However, in the case of a national or state library, the rules are different.  They have a statutory obligation, i.e. enshrined in law as ‘deposit legislation’, to acquire and retain the books they have for the benefit of the nation.  According to New Zealand writer and reviewer David Larson, in a lively critique for The Spinoff the relevant Minister has to sign off on the disposal of these 600,000 books.  Amongst other concerns he is alarmed about the process for retention and selection.  There’s more to it than whether the books have been issued within a certain time frame…

The consultation process, Larson says, appears not to have adequate expertise to identify which books are needed for research purposes, and offering them to other New Zealand libraries which have no obligation to keep them is a concern.  Then there are books that are published overseas, but written by New Zealanders:

New Zealanders are, famously, a nation of part-time expats: any number of Kiwis have contributed to this field or that by publishing books while living overseas. So if the goal is to keep “anything that is New Zealand and Pacific related”, that will require identifying a huge corpus of often obscure books published offshore.

Likewise, there are many overseas-published books by non-New Zealanders which touch on New Zealand or Pacific interests, often in ways obvious only to specialists.

Larsen stresses that many of these books are destined not for rehoming, but for destruction, but his article met with a droll riposte from librarian Rebecca Hastie, in a piece also for The Spinoff, ‘Weed in the Dead of Night, a Librarian shares the secrets of book culling’.

To see why it might matter that New Zealand could lose its only copy of a text that’s being offered for ‘rehoming’, I took a look just in the ‘A’ section of the Fiction List (downloaded from here).  For a start, the library is also offloading everything that Jessica Anderson and Thea Astley wrote, so Australian Literature isn’t a priority area for retention.  Too bad if a Kiwi wants to do a PhD in the comparative literature of our two countries.  There were titles I’d love to read by Kingsley Amis, Joan Aiken, Louisa May Alcott, Isaac Asimov, and Margaret Atwood.  Even Jane Austen has to go.  Top of the Bs was a stack of titles by Isaac Babel, which, along with three by Leonid Andreyev, mean that someone in a previous era understood the important of dissident Soviet literature (which is surely still a subject for scholarly attention.)

Lest you think that this is only an issue for this particular library in New Zealand, this week Inside Story is carrying an article called ‘Asia Illiteracy’ about a new collection development policy at the National Library of Australia, which is about to sideline its collections of Southeast and Northeast Asian material:

For almost seven decades, the National Library of Australia has been building one of the world’s most extensive collections of Southeast and Northeast Asian material. The legacy of accumulated investment and collecting by specialist curators, its store of Asian newspapers and periodicals, books, government documents and other rare materials is among the great treasure troves of Asian studies, and the most extensive Asia collection in the Southern Hemisphere. Researchers visit from around the world, and the collection is a foundation stone of decades of effort to build sustained and deep knowledge of Asia at Australian universities.

Now, much of this is to be abandoned. In a new “collection development policy” — the document which lays out what and how the library will collect — the library has dramatically downgraded its emphasis on overseas collecting. It has removed key Asian countries from its list of priorities; it has closed its Asian Collections Room; it has cancelled subscriptions to hundreds of Asian periodicals.

[…]

The new collection development policy makes it clear that the library is turning inward, sharpening the focus on Australian materials. Thankfully, the Asia-Pacific will remain the priority in overseas collecting, but the scope of the reduction leaves only part of the previous Asia strategy intact. Countries that have been a major focus for decades — notably Japan and Korea, and also all the countries of mainland Southeast Asia — have been dropped altogether from the list of priority countries for collecting. 

The catalyst for the New Zealand decision seems to have been the need to deal with a collection in a flood-prone storage facility which is too expensive to replace, while the NLA’s decision, according to Inside Story is forced on them by relentless funding cuts.

It’s always a matter of money…