I mentioned in my post on the second volume of Jane Austen’s Juvenilia, that I might do a separate post on one of its longer pieces, Lesley Castle. It’s one of her three longer pieces in that volume, and is often published separately or in other compilations, so warrants some attention, methinks!
Lesley Castle
Lesley Castle is another of Austen’s epistolary pieces. According to Juliet McMaster, writing in Persuasions Online, it represented a “step forward” in epistolary novels because the writers correspond with each other, rather than to someone “off-stage”. In this piece, in fact, there are several correspondents, writing to each other, resulting in different perspectives being offered on some of the main “characters”.
Lesley Castle is essentially an unfinished collection of correspondence between various “friends” who talk mostly of marriage – and of each other. Like many of the Juvenilia pieces, it demonstrates Austen’s love of writing about wickedness. It starts with Margaret writing of her brother’s adulterous wife running off, leaving not only her husband but her 2-year-old child, and of her widowed father, “fluttering about the streets of London, gay, dissipated and thoughtless at the age of 57”. Her correspondent, Charlotte, reports back about her tragedy, the death of her sister’s fiancé from falling off his horse, but she is more interested in food than in her bereaved sister. Insensitively, she describes her distraught sister’s face being “as White as a Whipt syllabub“. Such-self-centredness is rife in Austen – and you can hear her cheeky teenage self laughing as she wrote it!
Interestingly, this story is set largely in Scotland, which Austen never visited, and rarely mentioned in her works. Why Scotland, then? One reason could be to mock the vogue at the time for things Scottish. Margaret claims that she and her sister are happy there:
But tho’ retired from almost all in the World, (for we visit no one but the M’Leods, the M’Kenzies, the M’Phersons, the M’Cartneys, the M’donalds, the M’Kinnons, the M’lellans, the M’Kays, the Macbeths and the Macduffs) we are neither dull not unhappy …
The inclusions of “the Macbeths and Macduffs” is an additional pointer to Austen’s love of nonsense. She used lists frequently in the Juvenilia, often ending them with something extra “silly” to make her point. As I said in my first Juvenilia post, subtlety was to come in her mature works!
The new Lady Lesley, the aforementioned dissipated father’s new wife, is not so taken. She is also a friend of Charlotte’s and writes to her about her new Scottish-based step-daughters:
I wish my dear Charlotte that you could but behold these Scotch giants; I am sure they would frighten you out of your wits. […] Those girls have no music, but Scotch airs, no drawings but Scotch mountains, and no books but Scotch poems–and I hate everything Scotch.
Charlotte, meanwhile, had written to Margaret about Lady Lesley whom she sees as favouring “haunts of Dissipation” (essentially, cities):
Perhaps however if she finds her health impaired by too much amusement, she may acquire fortitude sufficient to undertake a Journey to Scotland in the hope of finding it at least beneficial to her health, if not conducive to her happiness.
The piece continues in this sort of vein with the correspondents often writing at cross-purposes, and, it must be said, focusing more on self-interest than the needs of others.
Of course, Austen readers always look for hints not only of style and themes (here, self-centredness, snobbishness, sensibility, hypocrisy, country versus city, and marriage) but of characters to come. In Lesley Castle, Charlotte reminds us particularly of a few Emma characters: Mr Woodhouse and his focus on food (though his is of a very particular type), Mrs Elton and her self-centred obliviousness to the needs of others, and, even, says Heller (referenced below) of Miss Bates in her garrulousness.
Margaret is a good example of Austen’s deluded characters who see themselves one way, while showing themselves to be very different. Many of the letters open affectionately, but contain or end with cutting remarks. Margaret, for example, writes to Charlotte complaining about being admired by too “many amiable Young Men” and expressing her “Aversion to being so celebrated both in Public, in Private, in Papers, & in Printshops”. She continues:
How often have I wished that I possessed as little personal Beauty as you do; that my figure were as inelegant; my face as unlovely; and my Appearance as unpleasing as yours!
Lesley Castle is probably not for every-one. So, rather than try to convince you to read it, I’ll conclude with Zoë Heller in The Guardian. Writing about Austen’s youthful work, she says that “as always in Austen’s work, recklessness with facts and inattention to detail are the rhetorical clues to a deeper-seated, moral carelessness”. How perceptive.
Jane Austen
“Lesley Castle”
in
“Juvenilia. Volume the second” (ed. R.W. Chapman & Brian Southam)
in The Oxford illustrated Jane Austen. Vol VI, Minor works
London: Oxford University Press, 1969 (revision)
pp. 76-178
ISBN: 19 254706 2
Whispering Gums 
Enjoyed this post and I have not read this from Austen so it was so informative – also liked that
closing quote from Heller
–
Thanks Prior. Glad you liked my post. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, I know.
😊📚❤️
“a deeper-seated, moral carelessness” !!!
I SAY ..
It’s a great description isn’t it, M-R, and shows insight into what Austen was doing.
But it reads like a vicar in his pulpit ..!
Haha, yes, it does …
I won’t be home and unloaded until Tues. But I’ll read the story and comment later that week.
That would be more than acceptable Bill! Thanks for letting me know that you’ve seen it. Safe driving!
Reading your review made me wonder if a family member or friend had recently visited Scotland and raved overmuch about it, which might have caused Jane Austen to ridicule it. I enjoyed the unsubtle digs in Lesley Castle and her Juvenilia very much.
Good suggestion Rose. Unfortunately, I can’t answer that.
I’m glad you enjoyed the humour I shared.
I suppose if they could someone would have written a very important piece on Austen’s influences for Lesley Castle!
Anyway, I like wondering about the human elements and am certain that her family must have encouraged her humour.
Yes, re the family … after all they didn’t have Married at First Sight to watch so they had to find some fun somewhere, eh?
Without television to stifle their creativity!
Absolutely …
The contents of this story is a great counter to those who say all she ever wrote about was love and marriage. Debauchery and adultery are a million miles from that idea of her as a cosy writer..
Cosy writer my foot! Haha, Karen, yes, I agree of course.
Some scandalous content in those letters! I have never heard of this one, but then I have not delved into much of her juvenalia. About how old was she when she wrote it?
Early 1792 we believe Stefanie, so soon after she turned 16. She seems to have written quite a lot that year. Certainly, she seemed to love writing scandalous stuff, which means her clergyman-based family mustn’t have been very stuffy!
I don’t know, if I am going to read it, but I do find it interesting how her writing has developed over time and I guess this one must be one of her earliest works?
Yes … it is, stargazer. Only for aficionados really. She wrote it in her early teens.
It’s taken me a while to get here, mostly because as I’ve admitted elsewhere, I got caught up in my secret vice, Science Fiction, but I have now read Lesley Castle, So –
1. I didn’t enjoy it much. I found the humour forced and, you know, juvenile.
2. There is not much sign of her later clear, precise writing. I suspect that ‘Susan’, offered to a publisher just four years later from memory, might have proved relatively immature.
3. I before E Jane!
4. JA’s juvenilia seems much more geographically adventurous than her novels (You will notice that Scotland is not actually described).
5. I much, much prefer Lady Susan which must only be a year or so later. And also Love & Freindship. but both are more complete works.
6. I do think the juvenilia worth publishing, but mostly to see how her writing developed.
7. I checked the year of Eliza Hancock/de Feullide coming into the family group and it seems to be 1790. She is often credited with giving JA the background for her writing about ‘society’ but I suspect she was also the source of some of the ribaldry, though also C18th writing, with which JA would have been familiar, was generally freer in that regard than C19th.
8. The dig at the pope granting annulments might follow similar anti-Catholicism in Ann Radcliffe.
This was well wroth waiting for Bill, so thank you so much for your dedication.
My answers:
1. No, I wouldn’t say I “enjoyed” it as I normally do a book or story, but I enjoyed thinking about young Jane writing it, and her family hearing it, as I read it.
2. Agree, and I suspect you are right about the original Susan (NA). We know she rewrote sections and renamed it in the year before she died but I don’t think we know how much. However, if we consider, say, Catharine, perhaps Susan was rather more controlled and closer to her adult writing than Lesley Castle might suggest?
3. There are many spelling oddities in Austen’s writing! Academics have written about it, but I’m not sure, off the top of my head, how much was poor spelling on her part, and how much was the spelling of the time.
4. Yes, good point. A young person’s imagination?
5. Agree. Lady Susan was probably around 1794, so close as you guess.
6. Agree. I feel this about most juvenilia, really.
7. Yes, agree with both these points. I probably should have made the point about the 18th century being far less prim than the 19th. It’s taken as a long time to catch up to, to revert to, their ribald honesty! Whether this is a good or bad thing is something worth discussing. However, I think it explains why such stories were enjoyed in a clergyman’s family. (Of course, there’s the issue that the clergy was more a job than a profession then but it seems clear that her father did take the responsibilities seriously.)
8. Fair point.
I’ll re-read the following JA post now, but I don’t remember that I had much to say to it. Thanks for answering me here at length.
I love your interest in JA.
This post is really so informative. I liked it so much.
Thanks CastrumtoCastle. It sounds like castles are your thing!