Where Charlotte and Jane Meet

by John Williams

New York Times
July 28, 2017

At the University of New Hampshire in the 1970s, John Pfordresher was teaching Wuthering Heights when he confessed to his students that he hadn’t read Jane Eyre. “One of them,” Pfordresher told me, “in a voice heavy with chastisement, informed me that I’d better read Charlotte Brontë’s novel soon. I did, with astonishment.” Four decades later, Pfordresher, now an English professor at Georgetown University, has published The Secret History of Jane Eyre: How Charlotte Brontë Wrote Her Masterpiece.

Pfordresher matches the events of Brontë’s life with those of her heroine step by step, showing where they overlap and where they meaningfully diverge. According to him, Brontë’s “painful and devastating” yearlong experience at Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge served as the inspiration for her portrayal of Lowood Institution, the school for orphans in the novel. But since Jane had a rougher early childhood than Brontë, the author’s experience at school would have been even “more terrifying, more overwhelming, more meaningless” than Jane’s.

Pfordresher goes on to analyze how Brontë drew upon her emotional ties with five men (two of them fictional) to conjure the passionate connection between Jane and Mr. Rochester. These ties included her “early adolescent love for and rivalry with” her brother Barnwell, which led to a “short, nearsighted, skinny, red-haired kid” being part of the inspiration for Jane’s formidable love interest.

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A Possible Keats

by Fleur Jaeggy

New York Review of Books
July 24, 2017

In 1803, the guillotine was a common children’s toy. Children also had toy cannons that fired real gunpowder, and puzzles depicting the great battles of England. They went around chanting, “Victory or death!” Do childhood games influence character? We have to assume that they do, but let’s set aside such heartbreaking speculations for a moment. War—it’s not even a proper game—leaves influenza in its wake, and cadavers. Do childhood games typically leave cadavers behind in the nursery? Massacres in those little fairy-dust minds? Hoist the banners of victory across the table from the marzipan mountain to the pudding! It’s perhaps a dreadful thought, but we’ve seen clear evidence that both children and adults have a taste for imitation. Certainly, such questions should be explored, and yet let us allow that there is a purely metaphysical difference between a toy guillotine and war. Children are metaphysical creatures, a gift they lose too early, sometimes at the very moment they learn to talk.

John Keats (1795-1821) was seven years old and in school at Enfield. He was seized by the spirit of the time, by a peculiar compulsion, an impetuous fury—before writing poetry. Any pretext seemed to him a good one for picking a fight with a friend, any pretext to fight.

Fighting was to John Keats like eating or drinking. He sought out aggressive boys, cruel boys, but their company, as he was already inclined to poetry, must have provided some comic and burlesque treats. For mere brutality—without humor, make-believe, or whimsy—didn’t interest him. Which might lead a person to extrapolate that boys aren’t truly brutal. Yes, they are, but they have rules and an aesthetic. Keats was a child of action. He’d punched a yard monitor more than twice his size, and he was considered a strong boy, lively and argumentative. When he was brawling, his friend Clarke reports, Keats resembled Edmund Kean at theatrical heights of exasperation. His friends predicted a brilliant future for him in the military. Yet when his temper defused, he’d grow extremely calm, and his sweetness shone—with the same intensity as his rage had. The scent of angels. His earliest brushes with melancholy were suddenly disrupted by outbursts of nervous laughter. Moods, vague and tentative, didn’t settle over him so much as hurry past like old breezes.

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The Nose of the Master

by Michael Gorra

New York Review of Books
July 22, 2017

For Henry James’s seventieth birthday in 1913 a group of his admirers commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint him; and Sargent’s own birthday gift was to waive his fee. The novelist sat some ten times in the artist’s London studio, and the painter always asked him to bring some friends along—“animated, sympathetic, beautiful, talkative friends,” as James put it, whose conversation would break the “gloom in my countenance by their prattle.” That was Sargent’s usual practice, and the evidence of its success sits this summer at the entrance to “Henry James and American Painting,” a compact but wonderfully heterogeneous show at the Morgan Library.

The portrait presents James full-faced and with his baldness fringed by gray. His head tilts just a bit to the right, his eyes are slightly hooded, and his expression looks shrewdly confident and skeptical; judging us far more than we would dare judge him. He’s wearing his usual winged collar and a bowtie, and seeing it here—its regular home is London’s National Portrait Gallery—I was struck by the fullness of his lips and the warm tones with which Sargent has painted his face. In 1914 the painting went on display at the Royal Academy and was slashed with a hatchet by a suffragette, not because she had anything against either James or Sargent per se, but simply because it looked like a picture of masculine prominence. It was expertly patched and to my untrained eye the damage isn’t visible; but a picture taken at the time shows a gash at the temple and another across the mouth.

The Morgan’s exhibit includes a comprehensive selection of Jamesian portraits along with other paintings of and by his friends. His brother William had planned to become a painter before deciding in 1861 to take up science instead, and worked for almost two years in the Newport studio of William Morris Hunt. But in the end it was Henry who spent the most time in artists’ rooms, and got the most from it. He too had gone to Hunt, and put in his hours with charcoal and ink, though where William and his fellow pupil John La Farge drew from life, Henry merely copied plaster casts. Still, it was enough to give him a taste for the painter’s world, the portrait painter’s in particular. It was a sociable existence, its easy chat mixed with the purposeful work of the hands, and the solitary writer was drawn to it as he would later be to the drawing room or the dinner party. One consequence was the frequency with which he used the studio as a setting for his fiction, whether in the early Roderick Hudson (1875) or a tale from his maturity like “The Real Thing.” And another was that he himself was often painted or drawn or photographed.

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Tom Stoppard’s heartfelt high jinks

by Andrew Dickson

Prospect
August 2017

Interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme in July, Tom Stoppard admitted he was stuck for what to write next. Brexit, Donald Trump, the election result, the Grenfell Tower fire: it was too much to process. “Art is somehow so overshadowed by real events,” he sighed. “Every time I blink, there’s a play begging to be written. But not always does it feel like a play by me.”

It is a tantalising question of how this most inventive of writers might respond to the events of the last 12 months. But one of the striking things about Stoppard’s career—now, as he begins his eighties, nearly 60 years long—is that inspiration strikes him in unlikely ways. It’s hard to think of another playwright who would write a spy thriller based on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (1988’s Hapgood) or a drama that calls for a symphony orchestra (1977’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour). Had anyone else pitched a two-act comedy about logical positivism, the script would most likely have ended up in the slush pile rather than at the National Theatre. Yet in 1972, with Jumpers, Stoppard not only pulled off the trick, but took it triumphantly to Broadway.

It is sometimes said of Stoppard’s work that it is all head and no heart; that his fascination with verbal high jinks and conceptual fireworks doesn’t mine the deepest truths about human existence. Yet few writers have engaged so passionately with the big issues of our time—faith, politics, revolution—or pushed the boundaries of theatre so far. And in a period of nervy global uncertainty, perhaps a few high jinks are what we need.

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No, Jane Austen Is Not Your Bestie

by Howard Jacobson

New York Times
July 19, 2017

For the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, the Bank of England has just issued new 10 pound bank notes printed with her likeness. A new honor for the writer. Or a new indignity, depending upon your point of view.

I propose we get our noses out of Jane Austen. Not her books, her life. A victim of the most inane biographical rummaging at the best of times, Jane Austen is suffering unconscionable prying two centuries after her death. Where she lived, how she felt, how long her headaches lasted, whom she danced with, whom she loved, who loved her. Ask yourself which of her characters would interest themselves in tittle-tattle of this sort: Mr. Knightley or Mr. Collins, Fanny Price or Mary Crawford, Elizabeth Bennet or Lydia Bennet.

As for referring to Jane Austen as “Jane,” as many enthusiasts do, it is more than an impertinence; it is singularly cloth-eared, considering the precise forms that address takes in Jane Austen’s work. It isn’t only manners that are at stake when one person trespasses on another’s privacy and distance, it’s morality.

In novel after novel, we see how disregard for the niceties of respect will lead to what is described in Mansfield Park as “too horrible a confusion of guilt, too gross a complication of evil.” Outside the barriers that ceremony erects, “barbarism” lies in wait.

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Jane Austen's facts and figures – in charts

by Adam Frost, Jim Kynvin & Amy Watt

Guardian
July 18, 2017

Two hundred years after her death, readers are still enchanted by her novels. Adam Frost, Jim Kynvin and Amy Watt do the maths on her enduring appeal.

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Jane Austen's on the new tenner – but her influence spreads far wider than that

by David Barnett

Independent
July 17, 2018

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a beloved writer celebrating a notable anniversary must be in want of a news feature.

But where to begin with Jane Austen? Died 200 years ago today, aged just 41; author of six major novels (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Emma and Persuasion); combined Regency grace with biting social commentary; insanely popular the world over to this very day.

Why should we care, though, about this Oxford-educated daughter of a rector, swanning around in her long frocks and bonnets? What relevance does all this old literature have on our lives today? What, indeed, has Jane Austen ever done for us?

She’s on the new £10 note, which is released into the wild by the Bank of England today, the anniversary of her death, though it’s likely to be another couple of months before the new polymer tenner finds its way into your purse. Since Winston Churchill replaced Elizabeth Fry on the fiver, it means that Jane Austen – accompanied by a quote from Pride and Prejudice, “I declare after all there is no enjoyment but reading!” – will be the only woman apart from the Queen currently on British legal tender.

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Jane Austen's Novels

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Sense and Sensibility (1811)

Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Mansfield Park (1814)

Emma (1815)

Persuasion (1818, posthumous)

Northanger Abbey (1818, posthumous)

Lady Susan (1871, posthumous)

Jane Austen Wasn’t Shy

by Devoney Looser

New York Times
July 15, 2017

It is a fiction that should be universally acknowledged: The old yarn that Jane Austen hid her writing, and was reluctant to claim credit for it, is an improbable story based on flimsy evidence. “Private,” “secret,” “mysterious” and “hidden” stick to her legacy like a wet white shirt on Colin Firth’s torso. In this, the bicentennial of her death, it’s time we tossed them out.

Interest in Austen is once again waxing, with devotees organizing celebrations of her fiction, life and legacy on almost every continent as the 200th anniversary of her death on July 18 approaches. It’s no wonder. She’s one of the best (and for some, the best — period) of our classic novelists. She’s among the most revered authors writing in English who also happens to be female.

Whether or not you think calling her a woman novelist is a good idea, her gender matters deeply. Austen was the female face selected for new British coins and bills, after feminist activists pressed for the change. In elementary schools, costumed Jane Austens are found alongside another inaccurately mythologized historical giant, George Washington, on ever-popular “impersonate a famous dead person” days. Children share the famous story of Austen’s hiding her writing, still included in many juvenile biographies, despite the fact that its status deserves to be downgraded to that of cherry tree chopping. The myth of a great woman writer’s overwhelming dread of being caught in the act of writing shouldn’t outlast a male president’s supposed childhood confession of hatcheting a tree.

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Which is the greatest Jane Austen novel?

by Margaret Drabble, Tessa Hadley, Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, Claire Tomalin & Ahdaf Soueif

Guardian
July 15, 2017

Hilary Mantel

Jack and Alice and other juvenilia

Charlotte Brontë did not like Jane Austen because she thought she was mimsy, with a fenced-in imagination. But the teenage Jane was ruthless, well read, exuberant and scathing. She understood the cult of sensibility, and sniggered at it. She parodied the gothic, long before she wrote Northanger Abbey: horrid secrets, fulminating infatuations, astonishing coincidences, catastrophic lapses of memory, road traffic accidents and the theft of £50 notes. Every “coroneted carriage” contains a long-lost relation. Orphaned babies – perfectly able to relate their sensational histories – are discovered in haystacks. In Henry and Eliza, two hungry children bite off their mother’s fingers.

If there is no logical connection between the actions of her early characters, it’s not because she’s child-like, it’s because she’s clever. She has understood that in genre fiction the conventions of the form overrule reason: so whenever the plot defeats itself, or the author loses interest, “Ah! what could we do but what we did! We sighed and fainted on the sofa.”

That is from Love and Freindship [sic], one of the longer stories. Some of the early ones are only a few lines long. But Jane’s shorthand is savage. No cliche goes unmolested. If her mature novels elicit a knowing smile, the juvenilia makes you laugh out loud. These squibs, remnants and broken stories, incised with glee between the ages of about 11 and 17, show how deep her art goes into her early life: and how aware she is already of the techniques and tropes that will later produce her popularity.

It’s as if she is mocking her own work before she’s done it. In The Visit, a short play, diners sit in each other’s laps for want of chairs, and the menu offers the absurdist version of supper with Mr Woodhouse in Emma. “Sir Arthur, taste that tripe. I think you will not find it amiss.”

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See also

In Jane Austen’s Pages, Death Has No Dominion

by Radhika Jones

New York Times
July 13, 2017

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen’s third novel, ends with the felicitous union of its heroine, Fanny Price, and her cousin Edmund Bertram, and so well deserved is their happiness that they might be forgiven for achieving it over someone’s dead body:

Equally formed for domestic life, and attached to country pleasures, their home was the home of affection and comfort; and to complete the picture of good, the acquisition of Mansfield living, by the death of Dr. Grant, occurred just after they had been married long enough to begin to want an increase of income and feel their distance from the paternal abode an inconvenience.

How ruthlessly Austen does it, sandwiching Dr. Grant’s last breath between the merits of Fanny’s and Edmund’s life — “country pleasures,” “affection and comfort,” “the picture of good” — and that pesky “inconvenience” of a lesser-paying job farther away from Mansfield Park than they would like. Dr. Grant exists to be dispensed with; in the end, he is nothing to Austen and her characters but an administrative hurdle. Death may have him, and he must suffer the indignity of being killed off in an aside in the novel’s penultimate sentence to boot.

The celebration of Austen this year, two centuries after her death at 41 on July 18, 1817, masquerades seamlessly as a celebration of her life, in part because she has proved immortal, and in part because as a writer she had so little time for mortality on the page. What was death to Jane Austen? We readers feel its inconvenience most acutely in material terms; had she lived longer she might have written six more novels, though the six she completed have amply sustained 200 years of entertainment, analysis, multimedia adaptation and, lately, zombie attack, which is more than one can say for Fanny Burney.

Austen covered sufferers of chronic illness: Mrs. Smith in Persuasion, Anne Elliot’s confidante, wise and infirm before her time; the invalids of Sanditon, Austen’s final, incomplete manuscript. She excelled at hypochondriacs: Mrs. Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, with her nerves; Mr. Woodhouse, in Emma, ever vigilant against a chill. Nor were her characters deaf to the rumble of time’s winged chariot: Anne Elliot’s vain father, Sir Walter, entertains a theatrical horror of aging. To him, crows’ feet and sun-damaged skin spell social suicide, a fate worse than — well, you know.

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Jane Austen’s Stuff, and What We Learn From It

by Amy Bloom

New York Times
July 12, 2017

“Where shall I begin? Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”
— A letter from Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra

“And a friend of mine, who visits her now says that … till ‘Pride and Prejudice’ showed us what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire screen.”
— A letter from Mary Russell Mitford to Sir William Elford, April 13, 1815

Jane Austen at Home is more than just an account of pokers, fire screens, writing desks, Jane’s round spectacles, handsome carriage sweeps in front of handsome houses, some very good and some very disappointing apple pies, the elm-lined walks of the Steventon rectory and the flimsy doors and uneven stairs of a rented house in Bath. But it’s not a great biography, and if it hadn’t been described as one on the cover, I would find even more to praise in these pages.

It may not be possible to spend days reading Jane Austen and reading about Jane Austen without writing phrases like “I would find even more to praise in these pages.”

Lucy Worsley is a British historian the way Julia Child was an American cook. She is history on the BBC. She’s been popularizing innumerable aspects of it on British television, everything from “If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home,” “Dancing Through the Blitz,” “Empire of the Tsars” and “Mozart’s London Odyssey” to “Reins of Power: The Art of Horse Dancing.” This last program focuses on manège, the royal art of making horses dance, a subject she encountered while researching her Ph.D. thesis on William Cavendish. (The project is, in Worsley’s own words, “bonkers.”) She has done these shows with a bright, impish smile, a wealth of information and open delight in dressing up and re-enacting.

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The Austen Legacy: Why and How We Love Her, What She Loved

by Jane Smiley

New York Times
July 11, 2017

Every few years, I reread a Jane Austen novel, and I’m not alone, according to Among the Janeites, Deborah Yaffe’s playful exploration of Austen obsession. In fact, if I were a true Janeite, I’d be handstitching my empire-waisted gown and perfecting my country dancing, and I’d enjoy it, as Yaffe does when she decides to go all out for a Jane Austen Society of North America (Jasna) convention. What I might not enjoy are the members’ competing opinions about who Jane was and what she would be thinking about every little issue, personal and political. And the Janeites are not all women: Yaffe interviews quite a few men. Perhaps the most peculiar is Arnie Perlstein, a conspiracy theorist convinced that Austen buried in her apparently conventional novels a “radical critique of 19th-century patriarchy” that he has “spent more than 15,000 completely uncompensated hours devising.” Other Janeites don’t need compensation. Among the most fascinating is Sandy Lerner, one of the founders of Cisco Systems who, along with her boyfriend-then-husband-now-ex-husband, gave you the router that allows you to sit up in bed and read this review on your computer screen. After Lerner sold her stake in Cisco, she bought and refurbished Chawton House, where Jane’s brother Edward Austen Knight lived, and where (in the nearby village of Chawton) Jane herself spent the last eight years of her life. Lerner then installed a large library of women’s literature written between 1600 and 1830 in Chawton House and opened it for study by students and scholars.

Yaffe’s tone is light but precise. Her “journey through the world of Jane Austen fandom” is amusing and sometimes mind-boggling. Every avid devotee has her or his very own Jane, whether secretly abused or coolly observant or a revolutionary in disguise. One fan Yaffe meets is the scholar Devoney Looser, author of The Making of Jane Austen. Looser goes to Jasna conferences and participates in Janeite projects, but what she’s really interested in is how the Jane Austen whose books were first published simply as “by a Lady” became the ubiquitous cultural presence she is today.

Looser begins by asserting that “she was not born, but rather became, Jane Austen,” which might have been a surprise to the Lady, given the self-confident wit and psychological perceptiveness of her novels. What Looser is actually after is what has led to Janeite-ism. To this end, she offers a good survey of the landscape of books in the 19th century: how they were presented to buyers and readers, how they were illustrated, which authors were popular and why. If the chapters on illustrators suffer, it’s only because Looser gives us too few examples to view. (She does point out that for much of the 19th century Austen’s characters were portrayed by illustrators as contemporaries of their readers; it wasn’t until roughly 70 years after Austen’s death that the characters depicted in the novels began wearing Regency gowns.)

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A Jane Austen Fit for the Age of Brexit

by John Sutherland

New York Times
July 10, 2017

The year 2016 belonged to Shakespeare; 2017 is Jane Austen’s, the 200th anniversary of her premature death. Her face has been chosen to appear on Britain’s 10-pound note (the same amount she was first paid by a publisher). There has been, and will be, a spate of commemorative events, festivals and, of course, books like this. We are, as the witty television series put it, “Lost in Austen.”

Helena Kelly’s publisher got her kicks in early by scheduling the British release of her book last autumn. And kicks they are. Jane Austen: The Secret Radical sets out to raise hackles. As she asserts, almost everything we think we know about Jane Austen is wrong. There has been, according to Kelly, only one person who has ever read Jane Austen right. That would be Helena Kelly. Moreover, that unique reader is closer to “Jane” (as she chummily calls her) than anyone since Cassandra, the sister with whom Jane shared a bed. (“Was Jane Austen Gay?” asked Terry Castle in a mischievous essay on the subject of that sleeping arrangement. It too sparked ructions.)

Kelly’s chapters open with biographical fantasias of Jane’s stream of consciousness at key moments. Inwardness is the essence of the book — and bossiness. Kelly ends with the schoolmistress instruction: “Read Jane’s novels. … Read them again.” Perhaps, enlightened by her, we can do something about our failing grade.

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The Perennial Student

by Julian Bell

New York Review of Books
July 13, 2017

What is a shadow? Nothing in itself, you might say: a mere local lack of light, in a space that is otherwise lit up. Light, which allows us to see and know the world, is the normal precondition for picturing things. Cast shadows may help us interpret a picture by indicating where light comes from and where objects stand, but if you survey art history, you find the majority of painters giving them minor parts at most. A minority, however, turns these assumptions upside down, treating shadow as the preexistent condition and light as its shock interruption. If Giotto, Bruegel, or Courbet present worlds to be seen and known, the seventeenth-century masters of chiaroscuro and their nineteenth-century sympathizers—think Manet’s Olympia—forsake solid fact in favor of dazzle. But once you open up that second possibility, a third emerges. Take shadow and light as opposite ends of a scale, and the tonal notes lying between them offer a means to compose pictorial music. The landscapes of Claude Lorrain or of Jean-Baptiste Corot show ways that such music might be played.

The art of Camille Pissarro—the subject of two current exhibitions in Paris, one at the Musée Marmottan Monet and the other at the Musée du Luxembourg—was rooted in this third tradition. Presenting his credentials to the Paris Salon in 1864, the thirty-three-year-old described himself as a pupil of Corot, even if his personal contact with that father figure to French landscape painters had been slight. Six years later Pissarro encountered other ways of doing landscape after he and his friend Claude Monet fled to London during the Franco-Prussian War. But when an English critic, shortly before Pissarro’s death in 1903, claimed that English art had radically enlarged their vision, the veteran painter, by now himself a father figure, indignantly reiterated that Claude Lorrain and Corot had been his mentors, and that

Turner and Constable, while they taught us something, showed us in their works that they had no understanding of the analysis of shadow, which in Turner’s painting is simply used as an effect, a mere absence of light.

What, then, might a shadow be, if it is not to remain a mere “effect” or an “absence”? A Pissarro canvas from 1873 that is now on view at the Marmottan suggests a possible answer. Oil painting can turn shadows from nothings into palpable somethings: slabs of rich color. The gently rising Île-de-France farmland depicted in Hoar Frost (Gelée blanche à Ennery) becomes an intricate weaving of russets, blue-greens, umbers, and pale yellows as morning sun shines on it from behind a row of poplars. As you approach the canvas, the bristles that have scuffed it with stiff, clotted brushloads seem to rasp your skin, and you are jolted into a poetry of chill January: a poetry sustained by close plein air observation and resolved with a scrupulous completeness.

At the same time, you may perhaps register the oddness of the operation. Those long stripes of shadow criss-crossing the ruts and country road are cast by no visible object. The colors of what’s sunlit and the colors of what isn’t meet in stout equivalence on the canvas, but for anyone on the scene—say that trudging peasant with his load of sticks—the former would have priority. We expect grass to be green more than we expect it to be blue. In effect, the shadows spook the comfortable farmland, nagging us with the consideration that a further unseen presence stands beneath the poplars, that of the observing artist.

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Henry James, a Pooh-Bah Who Painted With Words

by Holland Cotter

New York Times
July 6, 2017

“Nothing in the world hears as many silly things said as a picture in a museum,” said the poet Wallace Stevens, quoting a 19th-century French source, in a 1951 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art. Which pictures attract what kind of chatter will change somewhat with fashion. But the link between art and words persists over time. Poets and novelists have traditionally moonlighted as art critics. And some have found such multitasking beneficial to all the media involved.

Stevens did, potentially at least. He went on: “I suppose that it would be possible to study poetry by studying painting or that one could become a painter after one had become a poet, not to speak of carrying on in both métiers at once, with the economy of genius, as Blake did.”

One distinctly uneconomical genius who began as a painter, wrote as an art critic and produced more than 20 major works of poetic, book-length prose fiction, is the subject of the exhibition “Henry James and American Painting” at the Morgan Library & Museum. Organized by Colm Toibin, the novelist, and Declan Kiely, head of the Morgan’s literary and historical manuscripts department, the show is a cross-disciplinary jumble of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, printed matter and manuscripts, with no single form dominant and with James himself as a kind of multiport power plug at the center.

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