Jane Austen

Favourite writers: 2, Elizabeth Jolley

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Not , unfortunately, being a time-traveller, I haven’t managed to see or hear Jane Austen in person. I am, however, far more fortunate in this regard when it comes to the subject of my next favourite writers post – Elizabeth Jolley. I did get to see and hear her at a literary lunch at the height of her career. My reaction was the same as many others – her “little old lady” appearance and voice belied her sharp wit and earthy worldliness.

Elizabeth Jolley (Photo: Courtesy Fremantle Arts Centre Press)

Elizabeth Jolley (Photo: Courtesy Fremantle Press)

It’s not surprising that she is one of my favourite writers: I call her my antipodean Jane Austen. She is witty and ironic, she is wicked (though blacker than Austen), and she tends to write about a small number of people in a confined, often domestic, situation. But here the similarity ends. While the “character” of Austen’s characters play a role in what happens to them – there’s a reason why Elizabeth not someone like Lydia “gets” Mr Darcy – Austen’s main interest is in the social and economic constraints on her characters. Jolley on the other hand focuses more on the interior. She explores loneliness and alienation. She looks at the disturbing or unsettling sides of relationships, the ‘feelings’ people have but often don’t admit to such as those for a person of the same sex or for a person for whom they should not have feelings for (due, for example, to age differences, power differences, or infidelity). She shows how difficult it is to maintain a long-term intimate or deep relationship that is equal on all levels (physical, intellectual, social, material, etc).

In the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry (Vol. 25, No. 1, 1991), Jolley writes:

In my own writing I have been interested in the exploration of survival (perhaps emotional survival), resilience and responsibility. (I only know this now after several books are written).

How very Jolleyesque that aside is – humble but a bit sly at the same time. She continues a little later to say:

…for the most part my characters are perplexed, anxious, often frightened with perhaps one redeeming aspect in their personalities – that of optimism which might for a time, until it gets out of hand, keep them from the specialist’s doorstep.

Photo: Courtesy Fremantle Press

Photo: Courtesy Fremantle Press

The first Jolley I read was the short story, “Night runner”, in an anthology titled Room to move. It introduced me to her concept of alienation and rather black notion of survival, her particular brand of irony, her portrayal of characters who more often than not suffer from some level of self-delusion, and her dark humour. I went on to read Miss Peabody’s inheritance, The newspaper of Claremont Street, The well, The sugar mother, and An innocent gentleman, among others, and have never really been disappointed. I enjoy her use of repetition and self-referencing, the motifs and the characters, even, that reappear in different works.  She gets me in the pit of my stomach with her vulnerable but often unkind or downright cruel characters, but makes me laugh at the same time with her depictions of their attempts at survival. You just have to see Ruth Cracknell playing The woman in a lampshade to know what I mean!

I have not yet read all of Jolley’s works. Just as for a long time I kept back one Jane Austen novel because once I’d read it I’d have read them all, I am now doing the same with Jolley. Her books are so delicious they need to be savoured. I’m sure this is not the last post I’ll be writing about her.

When is a sequel not a sequel?

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Courtesy Cambridge University Press

Courtesy Cambridge University Press

What Janeites call sequels, others, such as Elizabeth Paton writing in the June 2009 issue of  goodreading, call fan fiction. And, I guess, fan fiction is a little more accurate since what Janeites call sequels is, in fact, “fiction written by the fans, for the fans of a particular book”. In her essay titled “Sequels” in Cambridge’s Jane Austen in context that I referred to in a recent blog, Deidre Shauna Lynch commences with “the sequels, prequels, retellings and spinoffs that Jane Austen’s novels have inspired”. In other words, what Austen fans loosely call “sequels” are not necessarily sequels at all.

Paton’s description of fan fiction works well:

Fan writers shape or expand their favourite works, taking existing characters, settings or plots and creating their own stories. Fan writers may attempt to fill holes in the story or completely change the ending, add new characters or transfer original ones into different settings, tease out subplots or even merge the storylines of two different books.

She goes on to say:

In many of these stories, the imagination can take precedence over quality. Pornographic content is common, as are two-dimensional characters, illogical plots and poor sentence construction. … you may need to sort through a lot of dross to find fan fiction gold – but it is out there.

Writing generally on fan fiction, Paton provides a brief history of the genre and a wide range of examples from a 1614 sequel to Cervantes’ Don Quixote written by Alfonso Fernandez de Avellaneda to Geraldine Brooks’ 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning March which reimagines Mr March from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She concludes her article describing in a little more detail “perhaps the most succesful sequels[!]”, “those rewriting or continuing Jane Austen’s Pride and prejudice“.

This brings me to Deirdre Shauna Lynch and her fascinating analysis of “sequels” in the Cambridge publication. Early in the essay she makes a rather apposite point:

the history of Austen sequels … seems to confirm a cynical understanding of sequel writing as the literati’s closest approximation to a get-rich-quick scheme.

However, she then delves a little more deeply into the phenomenon, asking why Austen’s novels have proven themselves so hospitable to sequelisation. She suggests there are two types of sequels:

  1. the kind (that I would call the “true sequel”) that goes past the original ending to recount what happens next. This kind she says feeds into the pleasure humans  “derive from gossip”. She suggests that “these narratives often feel like throwbacks to the Gothic and sentimental novels that Austen liked to burlesque”.
  2. the kind that finds other ways to return to Jane Austen’s world, such as reimagining a story from the point of view of another character, or combining characters from more than one book. These books, she says, sometimes explore unsettling undertones in the original, and can display “a kind of postmodern playfulness and predilection for insider joking”.

In her analysis she suggests that at least some of the “sequels” represent the very playing around with narrative conventions that Austen herself liked to do, what she calls Austen’s “unorthodox narratology” which includes repetitions, circularity and implied backstories (ie prequels).

I have to be honest here and say that while I have read Barbara Ker Wilson’s Jane Austen in Australia, I have never read an Austen sequel. I have been wondering lately though whether the best of them, particularly Lynch’s second kind, might operate a bit like a novel commentary: a good writer retelling Emma from Jane Fairfax’s point of view, for example, may very well jolt me into a new way of looking at Emma. And it’s never a bad thing to find a new way to look at a Jane Austen, or indeed any much-loved, novel.

When too much Jane Austen is barely enough

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Cover image: Courtesy Cambridge University Press

Cover image: Courtesy Cambridge University Press

Okay, this is not going to turn into a Jane Austen blog but, nonetheless, you will probably find her the author I talk about the most. Today I read Frank Kermode‘s review in the London Review of Books of the recent Cambridge edition of the works of Jane Austen, Volume IX: The later manuscripts and Claire Harman’s Jane’s fame: How Jane conquered the world. Having reviewed, for a Jane Austen journal, another volume in the Cambridge edition, Jane Austen in context, I was interested to read Kermode’s take on what Cambridge has done. Not surprisingly he is impressed by the scholarship involved though recognises the end result is not necessarily geared to the lay reader (or even the lay enthusiast). Funnily, he talks more about other books in the series than the one he is reviewing. He spends a bit of time on Jane Austen in context, complimenting the range and level of commentary it provides. I heartily concur – it is indeed a wonderful book.

Cover image: Courtesy Cambridge University Press

Cover image: Courtesy Cambridge University Press

I’m not going to ramble on here about his review except to say that in his very dignified and scholarly way – I read that he turns 90 this year – he has a sly dig at that pehonomenon that so frustrates we Janeites, that is the Austen enthusiasts who haven’t read the books. He writes:

It is said that among the television audience there were some who saw Darcy’s emergence from his pond – an event omitted from her narrative – as the high point of the book.

Need I say more? Anyhow, this leads nicely to Claire Harman’s book, Jane’s fame. This fame is a matter of some controversy among Janeites. Do we love the fact that everyone loves her? Do we become frustrated that by focussing on the films (including such biopics as Becoming Jane and Miss Austen Regrets) many “learn” things about Jane and her books that are not, in fact, “true”. Do we hope that after seeing the films people will turn to the books? What do we make of Pride and prejudice being rewritten as a zombie story? Or made into a Bollywood film? Or a series of Marvel comics? Is there a point of no return and has it been reached?

These are not, though, the questions Kermode asks. Having tracked a little the rise of her fame as described by Harman, he asks a more basic one:

How many novels of merit, less fortunate, have disappeared forever, or to wait for scholarship, perhaps only for a moment, to revive them. And is it true, as Harman claims, that it is ‘impossible to imagine a time when she or her works could have delighted us long enough’?

Good questions. And I would answer that I hope if those works are out there they do not replace Janeism but produce more wonderful writers for us to read and delight in.

Jane Austen’s letters, 1814-1816

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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?

Favourite writers: 1, Jane Austen

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This will (may?) be an occasional series of posts on my favourite writers. I will do them in no particular order of importance, with one exception, this first one. Jane Austen is the writer who turned my newly adolescent self from being a reader to a Reader. She is the one novelist whom I regularly re-read – whether it is to escape from humanity or delve more deeply into it.

jane2So, what is it about Jane Austen that so appeals? Charlotte Bronte famously criticised Austen saying that “She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound”. Bronte though misses the point. A child of the Romantic era, she views the world through feeling and passion, whereas Jane Austen who transitions the Classic and Romantic eras saw the world far more rationally. She turns a more Pope-ish eye to her subjects and laughs at the foibles of humanity. I believe it is her light-with-bite touch that makes her, along with Shakespeare, the most widely read, studied and adapted of western authors today. As she wrote in Mansfield Park:

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

Austen can perhaps be seen as the mother of the romcom but her romcom has bite. Like all romcoms her stories end happily for her main characters but unlike most modern romcoms (movies in particular) she is unsentimental, seeing even her main characters through clear analytical eyes. Her novels are not simply a matter of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, and boy-gets-girl again. They present a thorough analysis of the challenges women face in trying to make a self-determined way in a male-dominated world. The circumstances of women’s lives may have changed today but the truths of their lives haven’t necessarily. And so, while on the surface I enjoy her romcom, underneath it’s her feminism that keeps me coming back.

But there is more to Austen than her feminism. She is a keen observer of humanity and satirises – both through well-chosen words and phrases, and comic set pieces – pomposity, snobbery, stupidity, arrogance, hypochondria, greed and indeed any personality trait you can think of. And this is another reason why I love to re-read her because the more of the world I experience, the more I see in her work.

Then of course there is her writing. For some her long sentences and early 19th century language get in the way of understanding, but for me her language shines. She is terse and to the point. Her dialogue sparkles and she wastes little time on description. She makes me laugh, but she also makes my heart race.

I could spend time here describing each of her six novels but perhaps I’ll save those for separate reviews. So I will end here with just one of Jane’s observations:

The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.

This is Elizabeth Bennet caught at a bad time but you have to admit that, having seen Charlotte marry the silly Mr Collins and Mr Bingley talked by Mr Darcy and his sister into leaving the lovely Jane, she has a point.