So welcome everyone to our end of course roundup my name is Gillian Dow, and my name
is Kim Simpson and let's start with a little quotation read from my coffee mug
"the person be it gentleman or lady who has not pleasure in a good novel must
be intolerably stupid" Let's put this out the way! So we've really enjoyed reading your
comments this week and last week as well you've had absolutely loads to say and
we've actually learnt a lot as well reading through the things that the
things that you said yes it's worth pointing out that this is our first time
designing and facilitating a course like this and in lots of ways it's been
overwhelming really the diversity of the participants that the backgrounds you
are coming from and the level of engagement with the steps of the course
has been really impressive and I think somewhat surprising to us so thank you
for that yes thank you very much and we'd like to remind you as well that you
can carry on commenting, the message boards from week one are still very much
alive and going on and whenever you sign in you've actually got another four
weeks to participate in the course so we'd encourage you just to keep
commenting keep involving yourselves in the discussions and we'll keep looking
back and and seeing what you've been saying as well. Absolutely it won't be formally
moderated after the 6th of May but you do have as Kim says four weeks from when
from when you join to keep engaging with the material and of course
if you would like to formally upgrade and have continued access to the
material of the course that is an option that's open to you yes so I suppose we
should move on then and talk a little bit about some of the some of the
comments that you've all been making I think Allison and Amy did a really
good job last week of picking up on some of those fascinating conversations that
you were having about women's education about class about the publishing
industry as well and there were a few sort of bits that we wanted to to pick
up on so I think one of our participants Triana Barring made a really
interesting comment about men and music in Austen's
day, I don't know if you saw that as well - I did indeed - and thinking about kind of the
thinking about the way that men are participating in music in particular
in Austen's novels and actually was really interesting for me I haven't really
thought about it that much before but they're participating primarily as
listeners and actually the men who do kind of engage with music do so kind of
primarily out of the the narrative but in ways that signal sort of slightly
improper behavior I think they're using it as a sort of flirtation device...
Absolutely and Frank Churchill's gift of the piano to Emma - Jane - Jane Fairfax - goodness me!
Jane Fairfax in the novel Emma is a very good example of that, he wants to
encourage her to display herself and of course there's a real debate about that
in writing and education in the period isn't it how much is female
accomplishment to do with display? To do with doing the work of attracting a
suitor and snaring a marriage partner and then one can leave it off
and I made a comment in response to someone who was engaging with this part
of the course saying of course we need to remember Lady Middleton who was
apparently a fairly accomplished pianist in her youth but gives all of that up
the moment she gets married, so yeah that was a really interesting part of the
course for us to think about in response to your questions I
particularly enjoyed the level of engagement with contemporary reviews of
Austen's novel and using that wonderful database of production circulation and
reception that's not a resource that's linked to the course I mean that's
available to you anytime and I always find it fun to look up the reception of
these novels when they were first published, Kim was there anything you
wanted to bring up and in response to those? I think some of the some of the
reviews the differences between I think some of the reviews of Austen and then
some of the reviews of 'Self-control' were picked up on and the very positive
reviews of Austen and it just sort of brought to mind some of
the less positive reviews that I'd read on gothic fiction particularly the Minerva Press
publications and we've put some of them in the Gothic exhibition at Chawton and
again it's I think it's very interesting thinking about how even the positive
reviews of Austen's first novels are still very much kind of invested in that
idea of her as a domestic writer yeah so I think a couple of people kind of
picked up on how much focus there was on Mr. Bennett and I don't know what your
thoughts on that are but it seems to me that they're trying very
much to make Austen seem a very domestic writer. Absolutely and I'm stressing the
respectability I mean it's worth thinking more broadly about what the
purpose of reviewing is in this period reviewing as a practice is
relatively recent the two main eighteenth-century reviews
'The Monthly Review' and 'The Critical Review' don't start being published until
1749 and 1750 so you know this is a tradition that's relatively
recent and their aim is to be comprehensive, they want to review
everything that's being published the whole of the literary marketplace and
that quickly becomes impossible for them that it's not possible to do that and
actually reviewing novels is not a priority for them and you sometimes get
one-line reviews of the sort of Gothic or sentimental novels you're talking
about that say this would find place in a hairdressers you know really, or a
circulating library really really damning stuff so I think that's
interesting, lots of people in the comments picked up on wow this is
giving the plot away but I suppose the important thing to think about there is
fiction as a commodity - it's expensive you want to make sure that when you're
buying a triple-decker novel it will be worth your investment and it will be
safe to give to your wife and daughters to read so often the critics are
designing these reviews though they're targeting them at the male reviewer and
at a consumer who will be investing in this material so that's why you
get this comprehensive coverage and what we would now call plot spoilers.
So moving on slightly then I think there was some also very interesting
comments in the Austen's dirty walks section and we've just sort of started
beginning a conversation about modernity in Mansfield Park and how
descriptions of landscape have tied into that and I think that's got the
potential to be a really interesting discussion developing and also I think
somebody made an excellent point that in a lot of Austen's novels the movement
out into a kind of wilderness also coincides with the breakdown of social
norms basically or proper behavior and I thought that was just a really
interesting way of thinking about how Austen's making use of space in her novels.
Yeah, absolutely and of course and we always think of her I mean, inspired very much
by Virginia Woolf, as safe domestic spaces, the conversation of women in a
drawing-room but it's not always that and it's worth paying attention to when
that's not what's happening because it's often a key plot moment isn't it yeah
Absolutely, so other things from week one is there's the big controversy
over portraits of Jane Austen which I actually found really really interesting
oh yeah I really enjoyed reading reading your thoughts on that
some people were entirely sort of, of the mind that what Austen looked like did
not matter at all whereas other people I think very much kind of involved
themselves in that activity and enjoyed drawing and sort of feeling feeling
close to or feeling like they were getting close to the author yes yeah
absolutely and I think this ties back to basic approaches to literary fiction
really whether one thinks that the author should be dead and that one
reads their works in a very formalist way without any knowledge of who wrote
them that the text stands on its own or whether our readings are informed by
a knowledge of biography which ties in quite nicely to the section on biography
when we were thinking very much about how do we know what we think we know
about Jane Austen? Because of course, as Catherine Sutherland who's done a great
deal of work on early biographies of Jane Austen herself, as she points out,
almost everything we know about Jane Austen is mediated by her family, by the
descendants of her brothers, by Cassandra the recipient of the only authentic
voice that we have of Jane Austen, you know, her own letters but it's worth it was
worth thinking about the gaps in those letters actually I mean we think we know
things about her life so for example I think I'm certain it was Simon Henderson
who said very early on in the course well of course Jane Austen had a very
productive writing career in Steventon and then the great rupture happens, they
moved to Bath, they moved to Southampton, they have this very itinerant
lifestyle and then it's on settling in Chawton that she takes up her pen again.
We don't actually know that, and again it's Katherine Sutherland who's pointed
out very recently that there are so few facts known about her life in that
time that why not see her writing career as continuous? How do we know what she
was doing in Bath or at Southampton?There's very little actual archival
evidence that will give us that information I always like to point to
point students to the fact that in terms of her letters she arrives in Chawton,
the village of Chawton, in 1809 and then there isn't a single letter not one
until 1811 and that must surely have been a really productive moment in terms
of her writing, I mean she's working up to the publication of Sense and Sensibility,
she must be working some more on Pride and Prejudice, the ideas for Mansfield
Park and Emma must be brewing and we don't know anything about it at all. So
what she was doing in that period is actually entirely unknown
to us but subsequently the gaps have been filled in for us. And early biographers did a wonderful job in kind of
tracing her life but any biography must almost by definition be speculative
there's a reading of that life that is informed by yes, the archival
evidence, yes what we know of the period in which these authors were
living and also through the books and I think with Austen almost more than any
other author we are tempted to read the life in the writing we want to find her
which heroine is she most like? Is she a Lizzie Bennet?
Is she a Fanny Price? And how can she possibly have created these romantic
heroes I mean the extent to which they are romantic heroes can be debated but
how could she have created these romantic heroes without knowing romance
herself? So a whole lot gets read into Tom Lefroy, yes absolutely and I think yeah
that idea of kind of biography...it sort of gets replicated as well those
early kind of biographies do get repeated and repeated and they've become
this kind of solid basis for something that actually we don't know much about
Absolutely. So I suppose that sort of moves us quite nicely into week two and
into thinking about well, how did Jane Austen become so popular and how
did Jane Austen become so famous? I think right in the beginning I think it was
section 2.1 in yeah in the second week and a couple of people commented you know
how has she become so famous now and what did actually what did fame mean to
Jane Austen as well? What was she thinking about her own fame? Because of
course the biographies say you know she wasn't thinking about fame, she was
persuaded into publishing and she did so in a very kind of reticent way but
actually there are indications in her letters that that wasn't how she felt at
all, oh absolutely, absolutely and this has been the lovely thing about
about the course and about the comments board is actually how many of
you have been recommending things you have read to other participants and one
of the strongest recommendations for those who haven't read them is get
Deirdre Le Faye's edition of the letters and look at the letters because she is
so interesting about what the act of composition means and and how much
she views it as work, you know this is labour for her this is...so
we can't think of it really in terms of a profession but this is her
work and she talks about that wonderful letter where she writes that the nephews
and nieces have left and she has moments of contemplation to to think about her
writing again and she says wonderfully "composition seems to me to be
impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb" and I think
I think that's perfect isn't it you know? The domestic concerns, the looking
after children and making sure everyone's fed and watered,
stops her from writing and writing is what she wants to do. Which is
interesting in a sort of perspective of kind of feminist literary history because that is
something that comes up again and again, even sort of modern, 20th century..absolutely, in the pram in the hall - Sylvia Plath and those sorts of writers, so...
And Margaret Drabble who came up in one of the comments has been someone who
doesn't much like Austen but is preoccupied with those concerns about
how does one write with the pram in the hall? How does one write with
with the dinner to prepare and without the room of one's own? And so I suppose
we should also think a little bit about some of the comments on adaptation and
translation and it became clear that actually these things are
quite similar practices in many ways that the theories behind them are
interestingly kind of similar and some of the conversations I think that were
coming up on the message boards were also very interesting so
conversations that involve things like questions of fidelity,
how true to the original is something and how much does that matter
I think there was a big conversation about Isabelle de Montolieu's changing of the ending of Sense and Sensibility. The
wonderful Isabelle de Montolieu and I think there we have to
think very much in terms of what did the eighteenth-century reader expect of
a translation what do they think it's supposed to be doing? What do publishers
want to happen? Jane Austen does have a comment on translation in her letters as
you know, Kim. So there's a section where she's reading a work by
Stephanie Felicite de Genlis called Alphonsine and she said 'Alphonsine did not
do! It has indelicacies' that hitherto didn't grace a pencil and I can't
remember the exact reference but it's easy enough to
to look up, it's from 1808 and she says independent of a bad translation
this is a work that we shouldn't be reading and they put it
aside and read something else and we don't know what she means by bad
translation I mean is she comparing it to the original? Is she
looking, is it that the language is hackwork and so therefore she isn't enjoying it?
What makes it a bad translation well the critics are often saying in fact what a
translator should be doing is modifying the text to make it more suited to the
to the receiving culture so Isabel de Montolieu is doing exactly the right
thing for the Swiss, the Franco-Swiss reading public who are much more steeped
in the novel of sensibility than the British readership is in the
period so they want a Marianne Dashwood who's constantly fainting and throwing
herself at Brandon's feet they want that moment of redemption that comes when
Willoughby's wife dies and he marries Eliza and legitimizes that child they
want the bad boy to reform and of course it's not Jane Austen, it isn't Jane
Austen but Isabel de Montolieu was a European brand she's the big name in the
period so she has that liberty, we tend to think of Austen as sacred
and then of course she wasn't. I think I mean that idea of sort of sacredness
though is also really interesting I mean at what point do adaptations become
kind of irreverent, I mean and how much does that matter. I mean some people on the
message threads have mentioned things like Longbourn and novels and
adaptations that kind of explore the silences in Austen's work and I think
those are really interesting but then there are also novels that kind of
take liberties I suppose with the original text when does something become
kind of based on rather than an adaptation and there have been some
fascinating discussions of Clueless I think in particular lots and lots of
quite varied understandings of that and also discussions around this word Austenesque
as well I think some people have felt very much that this is quite a sort
of lazy term which enables people to use
Austen as a kind of brand to sell something that is sort of subpar. No absolutely
and it's worth I think maybe reading out Rosemary Wake's comment here 'Austenesque
strikes me as a lazy term used by those who attempt to reach a market by
hitching an inferior product to a successful brand rather than by focusing
on the substance of whatever they are promoting' and this question of Austen as
brand is a really important one for this section of the course I think where we
were thinking about literary tourism and the heritage industry, there was a
wonderful article written last year in an Australian periodical focusing on the
bicentenary of Austen and focusing on people who were doing literary
pilgrimages to Austen land and to England in the bicentenary of her birth
and it starts by quoting a gardener at the landscape gardens Stourhead who
says Jane Austen never came here but she should have done and just thinking in
terms of what the National Trust and places that Austen films have been
produced on, this is vital to heritage income you know and it really is
important that these places can brand themselves as somewhere with an Austen
affiliation because the heritage industry and culture in general needs
the Austen Pound, you know it needs these tourists to come it's vital to Chawton
to both the Jane Austen House Museum and to Chawton House and it really is this
sort of sense of literary pilgrimage is an important one and I am sporting here
some Jane Austen branding myself! This is from the Bodleian's exhibition last
year, a silk scarf printed with her manuscript the Watsons, this makes money
for the Bodleian library and it's tempting to scoff at this and it's
tempting to to view it as, well your word vampiric is a good one, you
know and Rosemary Wake's, you know, hitching an inferior product to a
successful brand I think is important too but the heritage industry needs to make
money. I mean I suppose one of the other kind of good things that comes out of
this is perhaps more kind of literary in that focus on Austen, the Austenesque
Austen-like novels, opens up an entire world of 18th century fiction written by
women. So Joan Greenleaf one of our participants talked about - it's in the
section 'Is Mansfield Park Austen's most radical novel?' and she was asking some
really interesting questions about well what do we actually mean by radical and
suggesting that we do more to kind of situate Jane Austen within a feminist
literary history which I thought was really interesting and a really good idea. And of course is
what you and I have spent our careers thus far doing and what we do very much
at Chawton House is Austen among women among her contemporaries.
It also opens up these really fascinating questions about
canon-making and you know what gets to be canonical? Why is Austen held up above
all of these other contemporary women writers?
How is she drawing on her predecessors? as well I think was an interesting
question that was asked because we don't know for sure what she read and
then but there are kind of certain tropes and certain interests that are
reflected from early and mid-century fiction so I think you mentioned
Charlotte Lennox's work - absolutely we do know she read that one but did she read any
Eliza Hayward? I would like to think so...well it seems
that she must have but we can't definitively prove that and then again
this is back to the problem of the archive isn't it? This is the problem
of how do we know what we think we know in relation to Austen so that's
fascinating I mean just to go back to adaptation as well I mean it is very
easy to to sniff at costume dramas and and to think of the text as the pure
product but if nothing else those BBC adaptations, those films do
bring some people to the book and I don't think that we
should knock that, you know if Keira Knightley as Lizzie Bennet could
bring a new generation of readers to Pride and Prejudice that
seems to me to be a good thing. But also to draw out those silences in the texts as well, to
think about class or to think about slavery I mean there were fascinating
discussions about what's actually there in Austen's novel and what gets
sort of thought about subsequently and rewritten into the text it provides us
new ways of reading these these old texts and I think I mean that's one of
the things that has become clear is the reason for Austen's lasting
famous that these are fundamentally kind of adaptable texts that speak to modern
audiences in ways that continue to be relevant and interesting I suppose. Yes absolutely
and we make them relevant and interesting and so
comparing Austen to her more acclaimed contemporary - so I'm
thinking here of Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney who both get name-checked
in her famous defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey and Maria
Edgeworth and Frances Burney, in terms of editions, now need much more glossing
don't they? I mean you can't bring a student
to - Maria Edgeworth cold, she's very steeped in the politics of the
period so we had you look editions and look at para textual presentation, then
does Austen need notes? Well not quite as many as Maria Edgeworth needs... which is not to say that you shouldn't all go off and read
Belinda which is a fabulous novel, please do absolutely, Belinda, Camilla and Evelina would
be great places to start for your further reading.
Waiting for us to design the MOOC on early women writers which I think is
something that both of us would love to do. So closing up here we did take on
board the extensive comments on this is too short and I think there's a couple
of things to say about this I mean the course was always designed to be about
Jane Austen's posthumous reputation and reception so it was never going to be
about close readings of the novels. We hope you'll all go off and do that now
but we did take on board that two weeks even for the content we
had wasn't long enough so we're going to be looking now into making it into a
three week course for the next run there will be new material there's going
to be new content so come back and join us for that three-week course when it
when it runs next and I should add to that as well that we would absolutely
love to see those of you who are UK-based or UK visiting at Chawton House
as well so if you do get the chance to come and visit drop in and say hello to
us there's lots and lots going on over the summer and and right up until
December actually and so you're very welcome to come and see us
there absolutely and ditto the University of Southampton, I mean what we
were really determined to do and I think we've done it very successfully is show
the range of expertise we have here in Humanities and especially in
English and in Film and in History on 18th century literature and culture
we're really fortunate to work with such great colleagues and we hope you'll come
and see us so goodbye from us goodbye and keep commenting and we'll be dipping
in as when we can!
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