So welcome everyone to the week 3 roundup of the January/February 2019
run of this course on Jane Austen: myth, reality and global celebrity. I'm
sitting here at the University of Southampton I'm Gillian Dow, this is Kim
Simpson and I'm feeling a little bit like Mr. Woodhouse fearful about the
snow that's falling down outside nothing like the participants who are living in
the Midwest and the United States but frightening enough for a British person
absolutely so there are some things that we wanted to talk about this week I mean
we're going to try and give you a week 3 roundup but of course there are themes
that have been running through the entire course and we want to address
some of those with you first thank you for your comments as always we've got
some really engaged participants and it's delightful to see the interaction
between you as well as the interaction with us as educators and with Amy and
Allison who've been doing such a marvelous job on the boards throughout
this course but Kim I know one of the things that you really wanted to address
was this sort of question of canon and question of how Jane Austen became Jane
Austen the preeminent writer novelist of the age. When we're talking about
myth one of the myths that I come up against over and over again is this idea
that actually there weren't any women writers doing anything really before
Austen and it's it's an idea that seems remarkably persistent despite the fact
that there were a lot of women writers right back into the kind of late 17th
century so we start with people like Aphra Behn and Mary Astell through to
Eliza Haywood and then we have mid century writers like Charlotte Lennox
Sarah Fielding and then of course the later 18th century writers who there's
more of a kind of direct influence perhaps on Austen to people like Frances
Burney, Mary Brunton yes and so there's this whole kind of wealth of women
writers who outside of the Academy are not widely recognized even today and I
think when you're sort of in the academic world you tend to kind of
imagine that everybody knows about these writers but actually still a lot of
people don't and I guess one of the things that fascinates a lot of feminist
scholars of the period is this question of what why what happened to these
writers because it's not that they were having a really really difficult time
and unable to kind of participate they were participating in the literary arena
they were writing novels some of them were writing poetry so you have somebody
like Charlotte Smith for example who has a real influence on William Wordsworth
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge absolutely but until 20 years ago probably Charlotte
Smith wouldn't have appeared on a on a romanticism course so I suppose the
question is what happened really and there are a number of different
responses one of which is to say well you know these writers just kind of
weren't really very good and I think I mean that is the case for some of these
women writers...it's also the case for some of the men - all of Wordsworth is not as wonderful as one would hope it to be yes
I mean there's been some comments on the boards about well you know they haven't
stood the test of time well not everything that Wordsworth
wrote has stood the test of time and yet he's a firmly established canonical
poet of Austen's period yes so I suppose it kind of leads us to the
question well how do we make the Canon and what do we think of as value really
I guess yes and so I suppose you've got somebody like Ian Watt who comes
along in the 60s and says okay well formal realism is kind of developed in
the novel by people like Richardson, Fielding and I think Defoe. Yes, Defoe - the great
triumvirate exactly not kind of really paying attention to the fact that
Richardson, Fielding and Defoe were very influenced by the women writers of
their time too so there's this kind of dialogue which gets forgotten and then I
guess there's also this question of value itself so you know should we
really be thinking of value as a formal thing or as to do with realism or are
there other kind of types of value that we might yeah that we might kind of that
we might discuss so things like you know can reading a woman writer of the time
teach us something about innovation with form with experimentation with different
types of literary forms or can they tell us something about what it was like to
be a woman at the time sure so there are all these other kind of ways I think
that we can think about value which in the late 18th century and in the
Victorian era just weren't really thought about and so these women writers get left out. And it's
interesting that you bring up Ian Watts there as well Kim in terms of the
great rise of the novel debate because something that we've been thinking a lot
about this week is questions of national perspectives and how different things
look from different nations and it's wonderful to have so many nations
represented on the course actually people who've read Austen in many many
different translations and that brings me back to one of the one of the stories
of the novel that I work on myself directly and I think is a myth that the
novel is a peculiarly British development in the 18th century because
it is not and one of the very greatest writers of the 1740s and this is a
pan-European writer is a woman called Francoise de Graffigny whose Lettres d'une
Peruvienne so 'letters of a Peruvian woman' was the best seller of 1747 and
had many many additions and translations and continuations of her work hugely
popular in Britain and who remembers her now and actually to say that she's not
remembered now because she isn't very good it's not true
I recommend her to you highly her novel is available in a modern English edition
and it's a really great read so I think when we're thinking about what the
novel's doing how it's developing in that period French fiction is important
and that brings us quite neatly on to Isabelle de Montholieu who I think some
of you are very surprised at her reworking of Jane Austen's Sense and
Sensibility and you are of course right to be surprised it's when we think of
translation now we're looking for fidelity we're looking
for something that transposes the original English into a new language but
Isabelle de Montholieu didn't care about Jane Austen's original English she
didn't know who Jane Austen was she was interested in reworking that narrative
as a creative original to suit the horizon of expectations of her of her
own of her own first readers in France as I think I mean it says
something really interesting doesn't it about where people are placing
value so she's looking at the plot rather than a developed kind of author
absolutely and I think other authors you know earlier in the period are using
their name but actually increasingly it seems like the plot does become a kind
of more interesting thing to translators who were looking at the work
for what they can turn it into rather than what they can kind of market it as
you know by this particular person yeah quite right and I think I mean the point
is made in the course and I hope you've all watched the video when I when I
interview Professor Bour at the Sorbonne about this and you know Montholieu is
herself a brand in the period hers is the name that's going to sell books
she's the pan-European celebrity Jane Austen is simply another British writer
with whom she can work and I think it's always really gratifying to see people
on the boards engaging with wow I didn't know that translation that fiction was
translated so quickly and why is Jane Austen on Paris bookshelves well
because lots of British authors were this is not about Jane Austen being good
this is about a market for British fiction that existed in France that pre
and post dates the publication of Jane Austen's novels I think I mean we yeah
we do tend to be very kind of anglocentric and to think about yeah to
think about only English writers it's interesting that there are now
translations of other writers I'm thinking particularly about the
exhibition that we put on at Chawton a couple of years ago which was
about Germaine de Stael who's another writer that Gillian works on oh yeah
absolutely and well worth reading again you know another one of these very
famous literary celebrities in the in the early 1900s Lord Byron writes a poem
about her and her novels are very very good but who's reading them now and she
is still in print but she's not a household name in the way that Jane
Austen is a household name so again there's this question about how did
these reputations get made and how did these people just kind of fall out of
yeah out of recognition and I do think it's something to do with with
posthumous kind of the posthumous shaping of reputations which I think you
know we looked at in week two didn't we did Jane Austen's biography and how she
was kind of yet remade as the kind of as a sort of perfect Victorian kind
of woman or at least with proto Victorian values that's right and I and
I think what I like about this course and what I like about watching your
engagement with it is when people come to the realization that actually in
terms of what we know about Jane Austen there are so many gaps and that makes
her very ripe for applying our own readings to both her novels and her life
and it's it's always very interesting for us to watch you do that
with us I mean it's something that's kind of come up on the boards as well
people saying well is it all right to apply a kind of you know a post-colonial
lens or something very modern a very modern kind of reading of Austen is it
okay to look at Austen through a feminist lens or is it kind of forcing a
reading that didn't exist there yeah but I think even Austen herself people argue
some people argue that Austen's a very conservative writer others argue that
Austen's a radical and I think she leaves us the space to kind of do that
and so actually those readings are really important in providing yet all
these different kind of interpretations of a single text and I think it's partly
what makes her so right for adaptation - yeah the silences and the spaces that
she leaves us to kind of fill in yeah and you're right to point out
these sort of diametrically opposed perspectives I mean one cannot be
radical and conservative one cannot be feminist and anti-feminist
but those readings are applied to her and and they can be convincing yeah I
think they are persuasive on either side I mean it certainly came out in the the
discussions about Mansfield Park which I do think is a really interesting novel
from that perspective because it does kind of tick a lot of boxes and you know
there's the whole kind of was Austen kind of signaling an anti
anti-slavery position in you know in this novel but at the same time you know
she's arguing against certain types of modernity that we see exemplified by
the Crawfords for example so I think yeah that there is this kind of real
complexity actually in the novels which these sorts of readings informed by
modern theory can do a lot to kind of draw out even if some of them are
slightly less convincing and if some of the adaptations are slightly more
irreverent, should I say? ultimately I think it is an engagement
with character isn't it I mean I talked at the lifelong learning day that we held
at Southampton last Saturday which I know a very few of you were at and it
was lovely to see you there I talked about her wonderful dialogue that makes
her very ripe for adaptation because one can lift entire passages out of the
novel and put them on screen and it's Austen's language it's Austen's words and
there are not so many authors for whom one can do that for whom that for
whom the the dialogue is written as if for the screen so she's very rewarding
in that way but it's also about the characters isn't it and not necessarily
the main protagonist not necessarily the Emmas and the Knightleys but the Mrs.
Eltons and the Mr. Woodhouses and those minor characters that are so very
very rounded and Austen's rounded characters as opposed to perhaps the
flat characters of Dickens is something that's been a recurring theme through
this run of the course that we can imagine these characters we know
characters like them so adaptation I think has has worked very well from that
point of from that point of view but also as a kind of way into Austen as
well I think when I teach students a lot of them have come to the
adaptations first and I'm sure for probably the majority of Austen's
readers actually they would have come through an adaptation or a translation
at the time if we think of Austen as a kind of global yes celebrity and what
Austen means in different countries yes so they've got that mediating
perspective she's been mediated either by the translators or by the actors or
by the directors or by the producers and that that's sort of fascinating it's
very rare for us to have have that mediated approach to an author but it
also just means that the real Jane Austen the real Jane Austen is obscured
I suppose and there are sort of different ways to approach that and I
think it is something we've tried to kind of do in the course to discuss all of
the kind of myths around Austen as well as you know as well as what we actually
know definitely definitely and I think I mean there are lots of ways that we can
take this forward as you as you leave the course and I think one of the really
fruitful ways that adaptations have worked in recent years is by imagining
characters having a life outside of the novel so wonderful play that I saw just
a few months ago was ostensibly the Watsons which as you all know is Jane
Austen's unfinished novel but of course it wasn't the Watsons at all the Watsons
is a few short pages nobody knows what's going to happen to these characters and
the playwright Laura Wade wrote an absolutely wonderful play that took the
the Watsons as a starting point but went in all kinds of new directions so it's
that creative original it's what Isabelle de Montholieu was doing way back
during Austen's own lifetime and playwrights and screen script writers
and and and directors and actresses and actors themselves are doing today with
those characters. Sanditon was...the end of Sanditon has been written several
several times yes absolutely and Andrew Davis is currently at work writing it
into I think something like a 12 parter for the BBC so it's going to be
fascinating to see how he makes that very very short unfinished novel into
the kind of Sunday night TV drama for which
the BBC is famous worldwide but yeah a very short novel but such a rich
novel as well you know particularly in terms of reading when we think about
Jane Austen and reading and the description of the library and yeah he's
been reading too much too much Richardson which always always makes me
laugh yes one can easily read too much Richardson I'm afraid canonical though he may be... although he was Austen's favourite writer apparently according to her brothers
but we know not to trust them so anyway we hope that you have enjoyed
this course the boards are going to be open for five weeks from when you signed
up so you know you can you can keep dipping in you can keep commenting you
can keep interacting with each other I'll pop in every now and then when I'm
when teaching and my sort of full-time job permits it's always great to see you
engaging with this material and very gratifying to see that people are
enjoying it so thank you for that the course will run again
I think another twice this year we don't have exact dates yet but keep an eye on
the Futurelearn site and you will you will see that and one possibility of
course that's open to you is upgrading and that means you have permanent access
to the material is there anything else that we need to say to people today Kim
I don't think so other than if you're if you're in come and come and see us, come
say hello lovely and thank you so much for your wonderful engagement we've
really enjoyed it good bye
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