Jane Austen Festival Australia

Monday musings on Australian literature: JAFA, an indulgence

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OK folks, today I’m begging your indulgence to let me stray from the “proper” theme of my Monday Musings series. In other words, I’m not going to talk – except for a minor digression – about Australian literature. But, I am going to talk about Australians talking about literature. Bemused? I’ll explain.

Quiet foyer at the Hyatt, outside seminar room.

Quiet foyer at the Hyatt, outside seminar room.

This last weekend in Canberra was the 9th Jane Austen Festival Australia. It’s a festival designed “to explore all aspects of Jane Austen’s world”, so many of the sessions relate to dance, costume, military re-enactments, and learning about the culture of Regency times. However, it also includes a thread focusing on Jane Austen’s novels, and in the last three years this thread has been concentrated into a day-long Symposium, on a theme. The theme for 2016 was the Chawton Years. For those of you unfamiliar with Jane Austen’s biography, the Chawton Years cover the period of her life from 1809, when she, her mother and sister were offered Chawton Cottage as a home after their father and husband’s death in 1805, to 1817, when Austen herself died. All her novels were published after the move to Chawton, but three were specifically written during that time – Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. (We could also add the unfinished novel, Sanditon, if we liked!).

The Symposium comprised 6 papers, and I’m going to reflect very briefly on each, knowing that some of you who come here like things Jane.

Edward Austen Knight and his Legacy at Chawton (Judy Stove)

Chawton Cottage (1985)

Chawton Cottage (1985)

Judy Stove was an early member of my local Jane Austen group, until she left town. She’s now an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of NSW in the Faculty of Science, but is also interested in, and has written on, eighteenth century literature. Her paper provided the perfect start to the day, as it was Edward Austen Knight, Jane’s brother, who provided his mother and sisters with Chawton Cottage. Judy took us through a well-constructed argument concerning Edward’s legacy, moving from his and Jane’s immediate family to his descendants, and their role in the beginning of we would now describe as the cult of Jane Austen. From this point Judy developed a case concerning cultural nationalism and the controls now being exerted in many countries on exports of cultural property. Her example was Kelly Clarkson’s purchase of Jane Austen’s turquoise ring. I won’t elaborate here, but Judy proposed that emotion may play a bigger role than rational thought in some of these “material culture” export decisions. A thoughtful, and well structured paper.

“My Fanny” and “A heroine no one but myself will much like”: Jane Austen and her heroines in the Chawton novels (Gillian Dooley)

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University in South Australia, with particular expertise in the music of Jane Austen and her times. This paper, however, was dear to my heart because it got into some literary nitty-gritty regarding point-of-view. Her aim was to explore the degree to which Austen’s heroines might speak for her, thereby giving us insight into Austen’s own beliefs and opinions. To do this, Dooley teased out, to the depth available in her 30-40 minutes time-slot, where Austen’s “authorial persona” does and doesn’t collide with the perspectives of her heroines. She compared excerpts from some of Austen’s letters with statements by heroines, like Mary Crawford (Mansfield Park) and Emma, and she teased out points-of-view in the novels, suggesting where we are in a character’s head, and where it is authorial comment speaking. I found this particularly interesting given my recent reading of Elizabeth Harrower during which I was conscious of a similar slipping between characters and author. As for Dooley’s thesis? Well, we’ll never know exactly who Jane really was, but we certainly have clues to consider!

Marriage in Mansfield Park (Julia Ermert)

Julia Ermert is a retired teacher, historical dancer and Jane Austen aficionado. She is particularly expert in the social history that informs the novels, in those things that readers at the time knew and which can add significantly to (even change) how we understand the novels. For example, a knowledge of the different carriages helps us understand status, and assumptions. And knowing courtship “rules” and practices can be critical to our understanding why, and how, certain events happen. For this talk, Ermert focused on that most controversial heroine, Mansfield Park’s Fanny, and the issue of marriage, that “coldly cruel social obligation”. She took us through laws and practices relating to dowries and marriage settlements, elopements, adultery, breaches of promise, cousin marriage, and the fragility of women’s reputations. Even those of us who know Austen and the era pretty well learnt a thing or two.

“Suppose we all have a little gruel”: the importance of food in Emma (Katrina Clifford)

Clifford is the Dean of Residents at Robert Menzies College, Macquarie University (my original alma mater). She did her PhD on sibling relationships in 18th century domestic fiction, and has written and taught widely on things Austen. Her talk started from the point that there’s nothing superfluous in Austen, that is, if Austen talks about food, or carriages, or jewellery, you can be sure it’s there to make a comment. Food features heavily in Emma: it explains the relationships between characters and the structure of Highbury life. Who is generous to whom and how, who accepts generosity from whom and who doesn’t, provide subtle (or not so) commentary on the characters. For example, Mr Knightley giving the last apples of the season to the impoverished Bateses demonstrates his generosity of spirit, whilst Emma giving a whole loin of pork to them tells us her heart is kind even if she doesn’t always behave well. These also demonstrate that both have a similar attitude to their social responsibility and are a good match. And what about Mr Woodhouse’s gruel, and Mrs Elton and the strawberry party? They provide the book’s comedy but also inform about character and relationships. Another insightful talk, in other words.

The ever absolute Miss Austen (Marcus Adamson)

Adamson is a psychotherapist and ethics consultant interested in the history of ideas and the application of philosophy to psychology. This was the most demanding of the day’s presentations, because of its dense erudition. Referencing philosophers and thinkers from the ancient Greeks on, he argued that Austen’s novels have a serious moral vision, that they present moral truths and certainties that are innately “known” to us. In other words, she asks the big Socratic question, “How should I live my life?” This runs counter to the common assumption that “small ‘r” romance” is the chief attraction of her novels. He then turned to modern times. Our current individual-focused world has, he said, resulted in the individual becoming “unshackled from society”, and thus losing, if I understood him correctly, a moral mooring. Nothing in our post-modern world is certain anymore, everything is open to doubt, and the consequences, he believes, are “catastrophic”. Austen’s novels, with their serious moral vision, can work as a “corrective” to this dilemma. I’ve compressed something very complex into something very simple, but I think that was the gist of it. As an Austen-lover I agree that, for all their wit and humour, Austen’s novels do contain serious commentary about human behaviour, but the bigger picture of his paper? It’s appealing but I need to digest it more.

Napoleonic era British Naval Uniforms demonstrated

Napoleonic era British Naval Uniforms demonstrated

Royal Navy in the Regency Period (John Potter)

After that talk we all needed to decompress a little, and John Potter was just the man to do it. An amateur expert in military and naval history, and in the Napoleonic period in particular, he turned up in full naval uniform, accompanied by some armed officers and sailors, also in historical dress. He talked about the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) and regaled us with much information about the British Royal Navy – its ships, its organisation, naval hierarchy and jobs. We learnt about weapons, and his “men” showed a few, including the dirk and cutlass. The Navy tended to be drawn from the middle class, and boys joined very young – around 10-12 years old – as there was a lot to learn about running a ship. The army was a different matter. He also explained how prize money was shared (which is relevant to Persuasion and Captain Wentworth’s returning a wealthy man) and the impress service (i.e. press gangs). A relaxing and enjoyable end to the day.

And that, as they say, was that. Back to Aussie lit proper next week.

Mansfield Park Symposium, Jane Austen Festival Australia, 2014 (Part 2)

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WORDPRESS GREMLIN: Those of you who subscribe to my blog will have received two notifications yesterday of my Part 1 post – as the result of what was rather a nightmare. I published the post. Up popped WordPress’s successfully published screen as usual, and then POOF it all disappeared. It was nowhere to be seen – not publicly, not administratively. It still isn’t anywhere that I can see, though I gather when you click on that first notification, you are taken to a page. Fortunately, I had previewed it not long prior to publishing and still had the preview tab opened, so I was able to copy and past that content and republish! Phew, I was planning to use the two posts as preparation for my Jane Austen meeting this month so would have been devastated (relatively speaking) had I lost it!

Continued from my previous post covering the first two speakers at the Mansfield Park Symposium.

Gillian Dooley, No moral effect on the mind: music and education in Mansfield Park

Dooley, from Flinders University, focused on music, making the point that music played big part in Jane Austen’s own life. She argued that Jane Austen seems to share John Locke’s view that learning (education, I presume she meant) is subservient to qualities developed through upbringing and experience.

Like Neilson, she sees Mansfield Park as being about education, particularly women’s education. She reminded us of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the rights of women which was published in 1792, when Austen was 17 years old*. Austen, she said, shows the “larger” passions in Fanny that develop in her along lines of Wollstonecraft. Fanny is not a musician. Her cousins, Maria and Julia, say she doesn’t want to learn music and drawing, but Dooley suggests Austen is showing Fanny’s resilience, determination and her desire not to be showy. Fanny has noticed, Dooley said, that such skills haven’t made them better people and she would not went to emulate them.

Despite their accomplishments, in fact, Maria and Julia are not shown to have much feeling for music. Sir Thomas realises, too late, that “to be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments, the authorised object of their youth, could have had … no moral effect on the mind”. In Chapter 20, just after Sir Thomas has returned home and discovered, to his horror, the acting scheme, emotions are running amok. Music is used ironically it seems to cover up the lack of harmony:

and the music which Sir Thomas called for from his daughters helped to conceal the want of real harmony.

For the Bertram girls, and for Mary Crawford, Dooley said, there is a dependence on material trappings and external appearances, on female trappings, that betrays their lack of the moral character we see in Fanny.

For Mary Crawford, musicality is an important part of a woman’s armoury. Jealously, she asks if the Owen sisters, whom Edmund is visiting, are musical:

“That is the first question, you know,” said Miss Crawford, trying to appear gay and unconcerned, “which every woman who plays herself is sure to ask about another…”

Mary certainly uses music as part of her armoury, Dooley explained. Mary’s appeal is increased when she plays the harp, and she sets out to charm Edmund. As Austen writes:

A young woman, pretty, lively, with a harp as elegant as herself, and both placed near a window, cut down to the ground, and opening on a little lawn, surrounded by shrubs in the rich foliage of summer, was enough to catch any man’s heart.

Dooley argued that the harp symbolises fashionable modernity and wealth. (It comes up in Emma, too, where Mrs Elton suggests Jane Fairfax would be better if she played a harp as well as piano.)

The saga of harp’s arrival tells, Dooley said, of Mary’s belief in the London maxim that everything can be “got” with money, including marriage. She is surprised when country values see her priorities rather differently. But Mary, as Fanny puts it, has “a mind led astray”. She, aligned with city values, is careless as a woman and a friend.

Fanny, on the other hand, is aligned with things country and natural. Early in the novel, she stands at a window looking out into the night, after Mary Crawford has left them to join a glee, and is joined by Edmund:

 “Here’s harmony!” said she; “here’s repose! Here’s what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe! Here’s what may tranquillise every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.”

Scenes like this point to Austen’s being on the threshold of Romantic era.

Anyhow, at the end of this scene, Edmund moves towards Mary taking part in the glee, leaving Fanny to her musings..

Austen, Dooley said, is not black-and-white on the issue of music. Mary Crawford truly enjoys music, is not just a coquette, and, while Fanny prefers reading, she also appreciates and enjoy music and dancing. Austen is however critical of the place of music in education. The musicians in this scene are judged as having wasted their time in developing their music skills. Fanny, in fact, says Mary’s faults come from her education. Fanny’s education, on the other hand, had been directed by Edmund (which ties neatly with Neilson’s thesis about “good” education).

At the end of the novel, Austen, through Sir Thomas, praises the effects of the Price family’s hardship – “the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure” – but during the novel we see that much about the Price family is not admirable. Dooley suggests that Austen’s point is probably that the Price family does not value decorative accomplishments. Musicianship, in other words, isn’t condemned but neither is it seen as necessary for a girl.

This paper is, apparently, adapted from her article in the June 2006 issue of Sensibilities.

* We don’t have evidence that Austen read Wollstonecraft, but we know from her extant letters, which start in 1796, that she was a prolific and wide reader. It’s hard to imagine she was not well aware of Wollstonecraft’s work and ideas, whether or not she had actually read the book.

Dr Christine Alexander, The genius of place: Mansfield Park and the genius of place

Alexander, from the University of New South Wales, focused on place, and how it relates to aesthetics and moral values. She commenced by suggesting there are three critical questions to ask:

  • Why is Mansfield Park set in countryside on an estate?
  • Why is the visit to Sotherton important?
  • How does all this relate to Fanny?

The country estate setting, she said, facilitates exploration of the city-country clash. Austen is following here the classical tradition in terms of the town versus country debate, which had flourished in the 18th century. This clash had cultural and aesthetic implications. Changes in agriculture, like that depicted in Downton Abbey (albeit a century or so later), were resulting in the collapse of rural patterns of life.

At the same time, cities were growing. An increase in trade brought wealth to the cities. But, contemporary attitudes were ambivalent. Cities represented art, culture, luxury but they were also characterised by sewers and filth. William Cowper’s most significant work, “The Task” praises country values over what he saw as the dehumanisation of industrialisation in the cities. Dr Johnson said of London that it “sucks in the dregs of each corrupted state”. And so, the Crawfords are seen as bringing to Mansfield Park their contaminated city values. The harp saga epitomises this clash: the harvest takes precedence, rather to Mary’s surprise, over the transport of her harp. Mary’s faith in “the true London maxim, that everything is to be got with money” is tested by “the sturdy independence of your country customs”!

Alexander reminded us of Sense and sensibility, and Marianne’s “feeling all the happy privilege of country liberty, of wandering from place to place in free and luxurious solitude”.  There is a sense here of returning to nature for moral insights and virtue. Similarly, Fanny’s response to sublimity is that nature can inspire virtues, reflecting a Wordsworthian view! Alexander suggested that in the scene in which Fanny and Mary sit in the shrubbery we see the superficial improvement of a woman set against real moral intelligence.

Yet Austen, she said, is not naive about country. The Crawfords reflect the variety and excitement of the city lifestyle, of the temptations of an undefined and unconstructed social space where people can live out their more “dubious inclinations”. The city is also where people acquire aesthetic sensibilities. Generally, in Austen’s novels, the influence of London is regretted while the country house ideal. She quoted Pope and his promotion of the “right use of riches”, of a “life of rural simplicity”. Ostentation, typical of the city, satisfies vanity and pride, in contrast to unpretentious plainness.

Fancy homes, she suggested, often disregard “the genius of the place”, a phrase used by Pope to mean the need to respond to/draw from nature and the inherent sense of a place. But this was a time of absurd grandeur, of conspicuous consumption by Whig magnates. The Mansfield Park community, by contrast, still fulfils country traditions even if some of the behaviours within run counter to those traditions. Sotherton, however, is in more upheaval under its new owner. Rushworth is overturning his mother’s traditions, manifesting the contemporary fashion for improvement.

In fact, Alexander argues, the idea of improvement is a significant part of the novel’s plot and moral structure. Austen uses the characters’ attitudes regarding aesthetic values and improvement to identify their moral values. In Chapter 6, Fanny listens to Rushworth on Sotherton and says nothing until he talks of chopping down trees, at which point she says:

“Cut* down an avenue! What a pity! Does it not make you think of Cowper? ‘Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited.’”

Alexander suggested that contemporary readers would have recognised the reference to Cowper’s “The task”. Most readers would have known the next lines: “once more rejoice/That yet a remnant of your race survives.” Edmund’s reaction that:

“… had I a place to new fashion, I should not put myself into the hands of an improver. I would rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of my own choice, and acquired progressively. I would rather abide by my own blunders than by his.”

shows him to be the perfect partner for Fanny.

Jane Austen, we know, approved picturesque views and approves judicious improvement (such as that at Pemberley in Pride and prejudice) and the creation of social spaces (such as Catherine’s bower). But, said Alexander, Austen, like landscaper Uvedale Price, disapproved the cutting down of ancient trees. Note, she said, that Fanny has same surname! In other words, Austen ridicules excessive improvement that fails to account for “the genius of the place”. In Mansfield Park, Rushworth on Sotherton and Henry Crawford on Edmund’s parsonage at Thornton Lacey, reflect this rush to improve. Henry suggests cutting down the trees, and altering the stream, so:

you may give it a higher character. You may raise it into a place. From being the mere gentleman’s residence, it becomes, by judicious improvement, the residence of a man of education, taste, modern manners, good connexions.

Henry’s improvements are not appropriate to Edmund’s role and, thus, argued Alexander, in vey bad taste.

Austen, Alexander suggested, is critical of the changing relationship between nature and artifice. In the visit to Sotherton, Fanny retires to shady trees, after being being sorry to see the dilapidated state of the chapel. Mansfield Park promotes the value of natural process and growth, of necessary improvements made judiciously over time. Alexander suggests that this process applies not just to the landscape, but to Fanny herself.

It’s important to note, though, Alexander said, that the word “improvement” is used contradictorily throughout the novel. You need to notice who is using it or in what context it is being used.

When Fanny returns to Mansfield Park after Portsmouth, she looks at the landscape again. These nature passages, Anderson argued, suggest growth and deepening of Fanny’s character, and reflect both traditional and romantic values. Fanny needs needs nature to recover. The old estate is suffering from spiritual impoverishment. It is not rich in the spiritual or moral values that Fanny is rich in. Fanny acts, she said, by refusing to act – and could be seen as “the genius of the place”. She assumes role of an improver, when she returns: she takes the place of the daughters, she is the faithful remnant of the older order and value system. But, Alexander said, appropriating the past does not mean being dominated by it. It means incorporating the best values as you change over time.

And so, she concluded, Mansfield Park‘s values are conservative, but Austen was trying to engage in a serious discussion about the state of the nation. Emphasising traditional values is part of her moral purpose. This is a conservative Austen “but with promise”. Fanny is open to change, to the romantic aspect of nature and natural beauty, but her idea of change is one attuned to “the genius of the place”, to what is appropriate, perhaps, for the context.

QUESTION: There was a question regarding Austen’s statement that she was writing a novel about ordination. Alexander replied that it is very much about Edmund’s ordination. Sotherton chapel’s dilapidation suggests that it no longer represents the spiritual heart of the estate. Mansfield Park explores, perhaps, where the church stands in relationship to changing values.

* During the Q&A at the end, the point was made that in the movie The King’s Speech reference was made to Wallis Simpson cutting down 700-year-old trees.

Mansfield Park Symposium, Jane Austen Festival Australia, 2014 (Part 1)

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The seventh annual Jane Austen Festival Australia, which was held in early April, is establishing itself as a comprehensive affair. Originally focusing primarily on Regency times and activities, it has gradually increased its literary content. This year it introduced a new feature, a half-day literary symposium dedicated to in-depth discussion of the year’s feature novel, Mansfield Park. It hasn’t been given the publicity that Pride and prejudice garnered last year, but 2014 marks the novel’s 200th anniversary.

Six speakers were originally scheduled to speak, but the two male speakers – for family and health reasons – had to withdraw at late notice. That probably didn’t hurt in the end, much as I looked forward to hearing the absent speakers, as the four remaining speakers provided more than enough thoughtful content for a morning.

I’ll report, as best as I can, on the speakers in order … covering the first two in this post, and the second two in a follow-up post.

Janet Lee, Addicted to letter-writing

Lee is a doctoral student at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Her thesis is that sister Cassandra was Austen’s muse. Austen, as many of you know, was a keen letter-writer and most of the letters she wrote were to Cassandra. Consequently, Lee chose letters as the subject of her paper.

Given the importance of letters to Austen, it’s not surprising that she used them in her novels. Indeed, we believe that Pride and prejudice and Sense and sensibility started as epistolary novels. Lee argued that letters drive Mansfield Park. Letters, in fact, are strategic turning points in most if not all of Austen’s novels. Remember Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth after she rejects his proposal?

Back, though, to Mansfield Park, in which letters feature consistently – and touch pretty much all the main characters. Austen uses letters to further the plot, but she also tells us about the politics of letter-writing and their use at the time. Letters, Lee reminded us, are critical in the opening paragraphs of the novel. Angry letters between Mrs Norris and Mrs Price (Fanny’s mother) on the occasion of the latter’s marriage set up a distance between the three sisters and their families that lasts until, many years later, Mrs Price writes another letter requesting the Bertrams take one of her children. This results in the re-opening of relationship between the families. In this way, said Lee, Austen “anchors and orients the novel with letters”.

And so it’s letters, for example, which carry much of the plot development when Fanny is in Portsmouth, bored and waiting for news. It is how she, and we, mostly learn about what is happening at Mansfield Park – but again, Lee demonstrated, we also learn about the art and politics of letter writing. For instance, Fanny receives a letter from Edmund in which he rather off-handedly passes on, at the end, his mother’s gossip about the Grants:

Everybody at all addicted to letter–writing, without having much to say, which will include a large proportion of the female world at least, must feel with Lady Bertram that she was out of luck in having such a capital piece of Mansfield news as the certainty of the Grants going to Bath, occur at a time when she could make no advantage of it, and will admit that it must have been very mortifying to her to see it fall to the share of her thankless son, and treated as concisely as possible at the end of a long letter, instead of having it to spread over the largest part of a page of her own.

This letter, though, conveys unpleasant news for Fanny – Edmund’s continuing fascination with Mary Crawford – so unpleasant that Fanny, who had been pining for a letter from Edmund, thinks “I shall never again wish for a letter to arrive”.

For Lady Bertram, though, things look up because, in the same chapter, she, who Austen tells us “rather shone in the epistolary line”, does get to write a letter of importance – about the illness of her eldest son Tom!

Early in the novel, Edmund talks to Fanny about her writing home and discovers Fanny has no paper. Not only does he furnish her with paper and pen, but tells her that her uncle (his father) will “frank it”. Readers of the time would know that in those days it was normally the receiver who paid for the postage. Edmund’s offer is kind, but it also subtly shows his rank and his power over a poor relation.

In Chapter 6, Mary complains that men, referring primarily to her brother, write poor letters in which all is told “in the fewest possible words”. But Fanny’s brother, William, is quite the opposite, and thus Austen conveys the depth of Fanny’s relationship with her brother versus that between Mary and Henry. And yet, Lee said, Henry Crawford is adept at letters, when he wants to be, and uses them as power over women.

Lee also spoke of Austen’s own letters written at the time she was writing the novel. They show her researching facts regarding ships (to her naval brother), houses, gardens (to Cassandra, about hedgerows). She also reports in her letters some pre- and post-publication responses to the novel, and asks her niece in one “to make everyone at Hendon admire Mansfield Park”.

Lee concluded by referring us to the Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts website, which includes Austen’s record of people’s reaction to the novel. If you’ve never read them before, do. They make interesting reading, particularly in the light of the ongoing mixed reactions to the novel.

Dr Heather Neilson, Mansfield Park and education

Neilson, from the University of New South Wales in Canberra (aka the Australian Defence Force Academy), commenced by apologising that she had the least experience in the room of Mansfield Park, and had in fact only read it for the first time in the last year.

She began by talking about her own education in Mansfield Park – about reading Edward Said and his critique regarding the significance of Sir Thomas Bertram’s plantation in Antigua, and about her view that Patricia Rozema’s film of Mansfield Park may not be an exact adaptation but is “faithful in concept” (Hear, hear, I said under my breath!).

Neilson’s talk was fascinating and I hope, given the time that has elapsed, that I have managed to remember her main arguments (from my sketchy notes at the time). One of her main points concerned Sir Thomas Bertram’s own education – about his poor education of his daughters. It occurs in the last chapter (48) of the novel. The people who must change the most, Neilson said, are Sir Thomas and Edmund. Like Mr Bennet in Pride and prejudice, Sir Thomas had not done well by his daughters. Neilson argued that his “enlightenment is complete”, that he will live with his regrets for the rest of his life. He has been educated, she said, by the scandalous behaviour of his own children:

Too late he became aware how unfavourable to the character of any young people must be the totally opposite treatment which Maria and Julia had been always experiencing at home, where the excessive indulgence and flattery of their aunt had been continually contrasted with his own severity. He saw how ill he had judged, in expecting to counteract what was wrong in Mrs. Norris by its reverse in himself; clearly saw that he had but increased the evil by teaching them to repress their spirits in his presence so as to make their real disposition unknown to him, and sending them for all their indulgences to a person who had been able to attach them only by the blindness of her affection, and the excess of her praise.

Here had been grievous mismanagement; but, bad as it was, he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments, the authorised object of their youth, could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self–denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them.

Bitterly did he deplore a deficiency which now he could scarcely comprehend to have been possible. Wretchedly did he feel, that with all the cost and care of an anxious and expensive education, he had brought up his daughters without their understanding their first duties, or his being acquainted with their character and temper.

Neilson argued that Austen distinguishes cleverness from moral intelligence, and that Fanny is shown to be guiding her sister Susan with affection in contrast to the way Sir Thomas had brought up his girls. She also referred to Mary Crawford’s less-than-happy upbringing. When Mary’s aunt (and guardian) dies, Austen writes that:

Admiral Crawford was a man of vicious conduct, who chose, instead of retaining his niece, to bring his mistress under his own roof.

Neilson wondered what Mary might have witnessed or even experienced with such a man! Critic Lionel Trilling argues that Mary impersonated the women she thinks she wants to be. She could have been educated by Edmund, but it’s too late. Her past experiences have set her.

Henry, Neilson suggests, is plausible. His devotion to his sister is creditable, he has talent for reading, is intelligent, and wealthy. Mrs Norris and Mary both blame Fanny for the Maria-Henry catastrophe. Neilson argued that we could discount these assessments on the basis of their sources but, she said, even the narrator suggests at the end that Henry would have been better had he succeeded with Fanny. He needed to be more patient, Neilson said – but of course, that’s the very point, he wasn’t. He was, rather, “ruined by early independence and bad domestic example” (like his sister).

Neilson said that Austen makes clear that Henry loves Fanny, but that we are warned against Henry. His reading of Shakespeare “was capital”, but it was from Henry VIII, which could be Austen’s code that he’s an unsafe husband. The novel’s unanswered question is whether a woman like Fanny could reform (educate?) him.

Neilson briefly discussed Austen’s narrative technique. John Wiltshire, she said, argues that in this novel in particular, the narrative moves between the consciousness of the characters. When you are in a character’s head you are more likely to have sympathy for them. Consequently, the fact that we are often privy to Mary’s private thoughts can make us feel at times that she is the heroine. (This adds, methinks, to the complexity of this novel and the fun to be had in discussing it!)

Neilson made some comparisons with Jane Eyre which is also a Cinderella story with two suitors. Both Jane and Fanny move from fringe to the centre but Bronte inverts the Mansfield Park story: Jane Eyre does not end up with her cousin. In fact, Neilson argues, in Mansfield Park the best possible marriages (from an education/reform point of view?) are perverted.

Finally, she briefly referred to Canberran Ros Russell’s recently published sequel/fan fiction novel, Maria returns. She suggested Russell had taken to heart Said’s theory regarding the relationship between Mansfield Park and the Bertrams’ plantations in Antigua, and the implications for British values. I don’t generally read fan-fiction, but Ros will be addressing my local group’s meeting in July, so I will read it for that.

To be continued …