Congratulations to our Jane Austen Week Winners, chosen at random from all the comments we received this week.
JANE AUSTEN wins a copy of A Charming Place: Bath in the Life and Novels of Jane Austen by Maggie Lane
LOIS wins signed copy of Carrie Bebris’s Mr. and Mrs. Darcy mystery Pride and Prescience
Email us at riskies@yahoo.com with your snail mail addresses!
Thanks to everyone who stopped by to share our celebration of the incomparable Jane Austen!
The Riskies
Happy Birthday Week, Jane!
This Wednesday, Jane’s actual birthday, I went to the Morgan Library to see the exhibit A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy. I went with two writer friends–Liz Maverick, whose new book Crimson & Steam features a historical section, and Elizabeth Mahon, who is hard at work on her non-fiction book Scandalous Women (and who also does a blog with the same name).
The exhibition combines Jane’s correspondence–both from and to her–with prints of James Gillray, one of the caricaturists who lampooned society and politics with as broad a wit as Jane’s was subtle.
As might be expected, Jane’s letters were gently mocking of the life she observed around her, sharing candid appraisals of her friends, family and neighbors. But–and this is true of her writing, as well–she is never mean-spirited. Honest, direct, even blunt, but never mean. That delicate line is one of the things that makes her writing so special; yes, Mr. Collins is a pompous ass, for example, but she doesn’t exaggerate the ludicrousness of his personality, just describes it. That is damning enough.
If you click through to the exhibition, you can see samples of the letters, as well as a draft of Lady Susan, the only surviving complete manuscript in her hand. That is neat to see, because she writes with as firm a hand in her fiction as she does in her letters–no cross-outs, or scribbles, or anything that would indicate she had doubts about what the final version of the manuscript should be.
In addition to the prints and printed material, the exhibit featured a short film with reflections on Jane from a variety of intriguing sources: Cornel West, Siri Hustvedt and Fran Lebowitz, among others. My favorite was West, who was almost elfishly delighted with talking about how much he loved Jane. He came to her late, he said, only starting to read her in graduate school, but he clearly adored her work.
Like Jane herself, the exhibit was small but all-encompassing, revealing a witty, clever, loving woman who had a lot to share to a very intimate group. That group has expanded in the 200 or so years since her works were first given to the public, but that feeling of intimacy remains. Who among us, reading Jane, hasn’t felt as if she were sharing a private joke with us alone?
Thanks for sharing your wit, Miss Austen, and Many Happy Returns!
Jane Austen did not invent Colin Firth.
Shocking, but true.
I’ve been trying to work out for years the real relationship between Austen and romance novels of the early twenty-first century. She was not, sigh, “the first writer of Regency romances.” She wrote contemporary novels.
She wrote about marriage for love in a society where everything had its price, but the majority of established married couples in her books are mismatched. Her characters, middling gentry, would mostly do better with a little more money in their lives, and very few of her hero/heroine matches face abject poverty or marry across class lines–there’s always that living to be had with the comfortable income, or he’s stinking rich (Darcy). After all, she said a large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
And that’s the trouble with Jane Austen, or at least, quoting her. She is a mistress of irony and subtext which is why she’s read 200 years later and we still haven’t figured her or her books out. What did she really think? Was she Marianne or Elinor or Lizzie or any, or all of her heroines? When does the real Jane Austen speak in her novels? Or in her letters, for that matter, full of all that determined chatter of acquaintances and fashion and social events, knowing that although she might write to Cassandra, her letters were public property to be shared with other family members.
Imagine you’re at one of those country gatherings in Hampshire. Miss Jane Austen is in attendance with her sister Cassandra, the pretty one who would have married if the young man to whom she was engaged had lived. Miss Jane, though, is a bit of a mystery. She has the reputation of having been a dreadful flirt, she’s quite good-looking, well-read despite a somewhat patchy education, and is well if modestly dressed. There have been rumors of love affairs, and an inexplicably short engagement to a man five years her junior but exceedingly wealthy. Her family is well-connected, handsome, and clever.
Her glance over the rim of her wine glass rakes over you. She knows the price of every trim on your gown and the price of the fabric, too, having patronized the same shops in Basingstoke or Portsmouth or Winchester. You thought you could get away with a bit of reworking of your gown, hiding the panel your maid scorched with a too-hot iron, but she notices. She’s done the same herself.
You’d like to make her acquaintance, but of course you must wait to be introduced. You’re flattered by her interest, but something about that piercing hazel gaze makes you uncomfortable, and you wish she’d turn her attention elsewhere. It’s as though she is taking notes. She leans toward her sister and murmurs something in her ear and they both laugh…
So if purists gasp in shock and horror at monster mash books that have zombies in Meryton, sea monsters among the Dashwoods, TV adaptations full of sex and wet shirts, or even Austen as a vampire, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. She’s a tough girl. She can take it and so can her books.
Happy 234th birthday, Miss Austen.
Question: Do you think you would you have liked Jane Austen? And if you met her, what would you ask her?
Chat away for a chance to win a prize…
Who’s Talking about Jane on Twitter
P.S. Happy Birthday, Jane!
All this week Risky Regencies celebrate Jane Austen’s birthday. Monday through Saturday each of our blogs will relate in some way to Jane Austen, one of the greatest novelists of all time, a novelist who wrote with such acute authenticity about her own time that she gave subsequent generations such love of it that we still savor Regency novels today.
In celebration (and appreciation) of Jane Austen we will be giving away prizes to two of our Risky Regency commenters this week. Amanda has donated a signed copy of Carrie Bebris’s Mr. and Mrs. Darcy mystery Pride and Prescience, and I have a copy of Maggie Lane’s A Charming Place: Bath in the Life and Novels of Jane Austen to give away. Our winners will be selected at random from all the comments of the week and will be announced next Sunday, Dec 20.
Jane Austen visited Bath as a young woman, once the guest of her aunt, Mrs. Leigh Perrot, who was later falsely incarcerated for stealing a bit of lace. In 1801 Jane’s father decided to retire to Bath, thus Jane had to leave the country village of Steventon to live in a busy city with her parents. Not being wealthy, their circumstances in Bath were less than ideal and the years from 1801 to 1805 (when her father died) were not happy ones for Jane. It is thought that she did no writing in Bath. Still, the city provided her with many opportunities to observe the various characters who lived in Bath and those who visited to take the waters. Perhaps Catherine Moreland of Northanger Abbey reflects the youthful Jane’s impressions of Bath. Anne in Persuasion showed Jane’s more mature, less admiring view.
When Amanda and I visited Bath on the 2003 Novel Explorations Regency Tour, what often filled my mind was that Jane Austen had walked these same streets and saw the same sites.
This is one of the places she called home.
I could imagine her walking a street like this one.
To visit the shops
And gaze in the shop windows.
Maybe she would explore the city and walk down steps like this.
Or visit someone’s Georgian garden.
She, of course, would view the Royal Cresent
And, like we did, she would have danced in the Assembly Rooms.
That’s me, second to the left in the dark blue dress. Amanda is just a little left of center and Deb Marlowe is a little right of center.
If you have visited Bath, what was your favorite place to see? If you’ve never been to Bath, what would you like to see? Do you have any tidbits about Jane Austen’s time in Bath?
Remember to comment for a chance to win! And to visit every day this week
And, don’t forget, Gallant Officer, Forbidden Lady is still in bookstores. Visit my website. I have a contest too.