A Different Kind of Woman, the final book of my Mansfield Trilogy is on its way! I’ll announce the publication date soon.
    My story blends actual events and real people with the characters from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and I'm excited (and a little bit nervous) about sending it out into the world!

    Leading up to the publication of A Different Kind of Woman, I’ll be posting some background information about the people and events in the novel. Here's the first of a series about the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who plays an important part in A Different Kind of Woman. There are some intriguing biographical mysteries around Shelley’s life which I have woven into my novel. ​​
​   Percy Bysshe Shelley is the archetype of the bohemian poet with his unruly flowing locks, and his open-necked collar. His disregard for social convention often caused him (and others) grief. For example, he was kicked out of Oxford for writing a pamphlet about atheism, he eloped at 19, and a few years later, left his first wife to elope with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
    As Shelley biographer Richard Holmes notes: “It was ironic that the result of [Shelley's] efforts to liberate himself and those around him from the trammels of morality and society” resulted in “an almost total entrapment in the complications of his daily existence.” 
    One of the complications of his life involved a mysterious woman. Or did she even exist?

   Thomas Medwin was a cousin and friend of the poet. In 1847, decades after Shelley’s death, Medwin revealed that Shelley once confided to him about a mysterious lovelorn lady. Shelley claimed he first met her in London, on the eve of his departure for Europe. This lady, “young, handsome and of noble connections.” threw herself at his feet, begging him to love her. Medwin even printed a detailed, florid dialogue between the mysterious lady and Shelley.
   Shelley claimed that the mysterious lady was willing to leave her husband and children for him, if he would love her as she loved him. Shelley told Medwin he thanked her but refused, owing to his commitment to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, whom he later married.
   The story didn't end there: Shelley claimed the mysterious lady, unbeknownst to him, followed him through Europe, spied on him from a distance, and in the winter of 1818, revealed herself to him in Naples. There, in Naples, she died.
   Even though Shelley scholars hold Medwin's veracity in low esteem, it seems undeniable that Shelley must have told Medwin some version of this tale, because we know that Shelley also told Lord Byron about the mysterious lady.

   Many subsequent biographers have rejected this melodrama as being completely false. If it is false, we have then, a grown man privately telling his intimate friends that he was followed around Europe by a rich, high-born, beautiful woman. If it is partly false, we have the possibility that Shelley had a dalliance with a mysterious lady.
   Counsel for the defence might, at this juncture, mention that Shelley was addicted to laudanum and he sometimes hallucinated. His friends acknowledged his tendency to embellish events, but they usually stopped short of calling him an outright liar. He just got carried away with his poetic sensibilities so that he could not always distinguish fantasy from reality.
   I suggest that his friend Thomas Love Peacock's satirical novel Nightmare Abbey contains either an echo of the story, or is the origin of the story which Shelley adapted as truth. Peacock satirised Shelley in the novel as an idealistic writer named Scythrop who writes a pamphlet “which he thought would set the whole nation in a ferment; and he awaited the result in awful expectation, as a miner who has [lit the fuse] awaits the explosion of a rock. However, he listened and heard nothing.”
   Here, Peacock is poking affectionate fun at Shelley's real life disappointment over the lack of response to “Queen Mab,” his first epic poem in which he laid out his theory of mankind, government, war and peace, economics, marriage, vegetarianism, the universe and everything. While the poem later became influential with the radical working class, at the time of its publication, it did not spark his hoped-for revolution.

   To return to the plot of Nightmare Abbey, Shelley/Scythrop was disappointed by the poor sales of his pamphlet. But the work was read and admired by a beautiful young girl who ran away from home and sought refuge with Scythrop because “I had no friend to whom I could apply, and, in the midst of my difficulties, accident threw your pamphlet in my way. I saw that I had, at least, one kindred mind in this nation, and determined to apply to you.”
   Did Peacock's tale, published in 1818, inspire Shelley to fabricate a romance with a mysterious lady? It was supposedly Queen Mab which attracted the mysterious lady to offer herself to Shelley. Or, was there really a mysterious lady and did Shelley tell Peacock about her before he left England for Italy? What parts of the tale are true and what is embellished?
   Medwin thinks the mysterious lady was real and inspired some of Shelley's most heart-rending poetry, including “Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples.” Medwin wrote: “Shelley told me that his departure from Naples was precipitated by [the death of the mysterious lady].”
   In Shelley's version, he is the one pursued and the mysterious lady is the pursuer. He rejects her because of his loyalty to his wife. But is this part of the tale consistent with what we know about Shelley and his relationships with women? My next post will explore this question.

  The unstated assumption behind Shannon Chamberlain’s Atlantic essay is that we shouldn’t enjoy novels with Happy Ever After endings (“What Jane Austen Thought Marriage Couldn’t Do,” October 3, 2019).
   Her opening sentence is: "Spend any amount of time searching for the villainous mastermind behind the marriage plot in Anglophone literature and inevitably Jane Austen’s name comes up."
   Even if the intent is to be tongue-in-cheek, Chamberlain is assuming that a) romantic novels are pernicious and b) her readers will agree with her on this point.
   Admittedly, some avid readers of romance novels make jokes along the same lines: "Mr Darcy," reads the sweatshirt, "giving women unrealistic expectations since 1813."
  Austen, Chamberlain goes on to say, "leaves herself open to several justifiable criticisms... [she focuses] too much on younger women at the expense of making older ones either irrelevant or ridiculous." Also, Austen doesn't illustrate what happens after the wedding.
   These two criticisms remind me of Caroline Bingley’s remark that balls would be more rational if they featured “conversation instead of dancing." "Much more rational,” her brother agrees, “but it would not be near so much like a ball."
   Surely anyone who wants conversation instead of dancing is free to pick up the book of their choice and let the rest of us enjoy some time alone with our favourite Austen heroes?

  One justification, I suppose, for taking Austen to task is that she is so ubiquitous and influential. Austen’s tone is ironic rather than sentimental and her concluding love scenes are notoriously restrained and brief, yet she is associated with palpitating romance today.
   Chamberlain provides some context for Austen's novels. Austen wrote at a time when marriages were no longer arranged by parents and started being love matches. People began to expect more happiness and fulfillment from marriage. (Let me mention in passing that it is nice to see an acknowledgement in a mainstream magazine that capitalism is responsible for freeing women from being chattel.) So therefore Austen can be criticized because she didn't “leave [her] readers much idea about how to conduct themselves once the rice is swept up and the bill for the reception comes in.“ 

     The idea that novels gave young women unrealistic notions of life was a common criticism in Austen’s day as well. To cite just one example, Sir Edgerton Brydges wrote in 1820 that novels “often do much mischief… they cherish… false views of life, which it is the proper business of books to correct and cure.”
   So we find that a 19th century baronet is in perfect accord with a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. 
     I will close with the following quote from Sense & Sensibility, as evidence that Austen perfectly well understood that the intense felicity of courtship settles down into something else after marriage--and she paid her readers the compliment of supposing they understood it as well:

  "[Edmund Ferrars] could do nothing till he were assured of his fate with Miss Dashwood; and by his rapidity in seeking THAT fate, it is to be supposed... in spite of the modesty with which he rated his own deserts, and the politeness with which he talked of his doubts, he did not, upon the whole, expect a very cruel reception. It was his business, however, to say that he DID, and he said it very prettily. What he might say on the subject a twelvemonth after, must be referred to the imagination of husbands and wives."

     After I watched To Walk Invisible, written and directed by Sally Wainwright, I got a brief case of Brontë fever, so I read a biography of Emily Brontë  and a biography of Charlotte Brontë which made me want to watch To Walk Invisible again. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.
   The story tracks a few years in the lives of the family from the time Charlotte is recovering from a hopeless infatuation with a married man, to the death of Branwell. Branwell is brilliantly played by Adam Nagaitis, and his slow self-destruction is a major part of the story, In fact, some reviewers have complained that there is too much Branwell in a film that is supposed to be about the Brontë sisters. Perhaps so, but the misery of the family during Branwell's fatal slide into addiction is an integral part of the story. Charlotte biographer Claire Harman notes that the sisters knew that Branwell, being the only boy, was the favourite of his father.  In the film, the girls look at their father with silent resignation when he expresses, yet again, his hope that Branwell will pull himself together. Branwell had the freedom to pursue many careers; he squandered all his chances. 
   Charlotte seethes with resentment at the restrictions placed on her by society, and Anne is worried about their precarious financial future.

   Later in the story, Charlotte, curious about Emily's writing,  sneaks into her room while Emily is out walking on the moors. She rummages around and finds a book of poetry which she opens and starts to read. Stunned by the power and beauty of Emily's verse, she sinks down on the bed, still reading. Behind her  the sun streams through the window and lights up a large amber hair comb on the back of her head. I do wonder if this is a symbolic reference to the flame sequence at the beginning of the story.
   The house used in the filming is a replica of the original Brontë house, which was significantly altered after Rev. Patrick Brontë's death. As shown at the top of this post, the house faced the church graveyard and backed onto the moors--a grim surrounding, and yet the sisters hated living anywhere else, and whenever they had to leave home to earn money teaching, they suffered acute emotional and often physical distress.
   The camera captures the streaks of the thick oil paint on the doors, the mud in the courtyard, the large flagstones in the hallway, which hurt Aunt Branwell's feet to walk upon.  (Aunt Branwell is dead by the time of the movie but it is her legacy to the girls which made it possible for them to publish their book of poetry).
  Rev. Brontë's study, where he spent most of his time, is across the hall from the dining room where the girls wrote and walked and talked at night, after he went to bed. In a world before central heating, the interior doors are usually kept closed. It is a household full of secrets and unspoken feelings. 

For months the family endured the misery of living with an alcoholic and opium addict who was often psychologically and even physically abusive. There was no escaping the situation, and no way of solving it, either.
  In one scene, the doctor comes after Branwell has had an episode of delirium tremens, and sits and talks to the Rev. Bronte in his study. The camera slowly pans across the door, looking in on the conversation from the hallway. The technique reminds me of the way Ang Lee also framed some conversations in Sense & Sensibility, showing Eleanor and her mother in their tiny cottage, while Eleanor talks about their reduced circumstances.

   What little narration there is in the film is through the device of Charlotte Brontë writing to her friend Ellen Nussey, who we do not meet until almost the end of the story. The rest of the exposition is mostly given to Emily and Anne. Anne explains to Emily why Branwell was fired from his tutoring job, and Emily explains to Anne that Charlotte was eating her heart out over her old teacher, Monsieur Heger. But mostly, the family circumstances and their relationships between the siblings are shown, rather than told.
   There is also the sweet, awkward interplay between Charlotte and her father's curate, who later became her husband.
    There are so many wonderful scenes: Emily's furious anger at Charlotte when she discovers Charlotte has been through her things in her bedroom, contrasted with her compassion for Branwell.

   In one scene, it is Sunday morning and Branwell is staggering up the street after delivering a note to a friend, begging him for some gin. The church bells are ringing. The three sisters, of course, exit the house and start walking down the hill to church, carrying their prayer books. They see Branwell. It's a humiliating  moment.
​   They are going to a house of worship, their father is the spiritual leader of the village and now they are reminded of the hopeless reality of their family situation. All of Haworth, of course, knows about the shortcomings of the minister's son. 
   Charlotte looks at him and then resolutely looks away. Anne looks pained and hurt. They pass him, continuing their walk, but then Emily stops, and goes back to help him struggle home.
   Another realistic detail here: when the girls walk outside, the hems of their skirts brush the wet pavement and get dirty and muddy. You can see it on Anne's blue skirt in the photo above. They have to pick their skirts and petticoats up to go up and down stairs without tripping. Charlotte always seems to run impatiently up the stairs with her skirts in her hands and Emily sometimes tucks her skirt up when she is working outside in the courtyard. (I recently read that the medical discovery that germs, particularly tuberculosis germs, could be picked up from the sidewalk, is what led to the shortening of women's skirts to ankle height at the turn of the last century.)

   The attention to detail, as for example, the use of natural light and candles and oil lamps, creates such a feeling of authenticity. One pet peeve of mine with period dramas is that women are always shown with their sewing, but they are stitching away with only a few inches of thread on their needle, which is ridiculous. In To Walk Invisible we see the endless daily household chores carried out by  the arthritic old housekeeper Tabby and a young female servant.
​   Emily makes the bread for the family, kneading the dough in a way which makes it obvious you wouldn't want to get on her bad side. Anne sits and chats with her, idly brushing flour off the rim of a ceramic canister as she talks. 

   Little details. Again, Emily is in the kitchen, writing a journal entry in the miniscule handwriting the Brontë siblings used for their private writing. We see a close up of her rough and dirty fingernails. She's been snacking on berries. There's someone at the front door. She gets up to answer it, but as she approaches the door, Anne comes out of the dining room. Anne goes to the door, and Emily--who assiduously avoided contact with anyone outside the family-- swiftly steps behind the door so whoever it is will not see her. Nothing is said about it, that's just the way Emily is. ​ 
​   I think all the actresses do a wonderful job of showing the contrasting personalities of the sisters.

 Anne is the gentle mediator in the sometimes fraught relationship between Emily and her older sister Charlotte.
  Charlotte appears to do the least amount of housework. (Apparently in real life she did lend a hand with  sweeping and stove-blacking when Tabby was too ill to work). After Branwell has started a fire in his room, Anne is down on her knees, scrubbing the woodwork, Emily is picking up the empty bottles, and Charlotte is sitting and looking at her brother's papers and books--the least grimy job.
   After Branwell's death, Tabby, Emily and Anne perform the ritual of washing the body. Charlotte sits downstairs in the dining room, weeping, Her father, who for years did not even dine with his children, sits weeping in another room.

   There are two endings to the story: one is when Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey arrives to visit the family and goes walking on the moors with the sisters. They see a sundog, or parhelion, in the sky. Ellen tells the sisters, it is you, you are the three suns. This incident apparently really happened, as recalled by Ellen Nussey, (although actress Chloe Pirrie, who played Emily, did not seem to be aware of that in this interview.) It was not, in other words, dreamt up by the director. This dramatic moment would ordinarily be a closing scene, but it is followed by the death of Branwell, and then, we are told in screen titles about the death of Emily and Anne. The camera pans and moves from the past to modern day and we see the people coming to pay homage to the Brontës at the parsonage-house-turned-museum, a cinematic transition some viewers have found jarring. In my case it is more a feeling of disappointment that the engrossing story is over. But one can watch it again, and I have and will.

Jane Austen died on this day, 202 years ago, in rented rooms in Winchester, attended by her loving sister Cassandra and under the care of a well-respected local physician.
    Her death was lamented by her friends and family at the time, and we still mourn today for the premature loss of an extraordinary individual and a transcendentally gifted artist.
    We Janeites tend to be very proprietorial about "our Jane," responding with indignation to her critics, and in the case of her death, wishing that there was something more that could have been done. But Dr. Helena Kelly takes this proprietorial attitude to new heights. As I have previously noted, she tends to discount and dismiss any other interpretation of Austen's life and work but her own. And by dismiss, I mean that she calls Austen's own relatives liars and fibbers who didn't understand Austen nearly so well as she does.
     Dr. Kelly suggests that Austen "may" have been killed by her physician with a drug overdose. "She was, I think it's fairly clear, killed with kindness." She further suggests that Austen might not even been fatally ill.
    The nature of her illness was unknown at the time, and various diagnoses have been put forth subsequently. Medicine was of course very limited in those days, but although her "medical attendant" Dr. Lyford was unacquainted with x-rays, CAT-scans and blood tests, he was very well acquainted with death, and I suggest that he could recognize its approach. Shortly before Austen's passing, her brother James wrote to his son to say "Mr. Lyford has candidly told us that her case is desperate... with such a pulse it was impossible for any person to last long."
    After Austen's death, Cassandra described her sister's final days and hours in letters to her nieces and others. Everyone involved in Austen's care, and Austen herself, wrote that she experienced little severe pain during the course of her long illness, except near the very end, when she struggled and was restless. Cassandra, undoubtedly wanting to provide relief, asked her if she felt pain and if so, where, but Austen was unable to articulate an answer. "She was seized again with the same faintness, which was followed by the sufferings she could not describe." Dr. Lyford was summoned and "applied something to give her ease."

   Thereafter, Austen was "in a state of quiet insensibility" until her death.
​  Dr. Kelly, recounting this scene in her book, Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, warns us that we ought not to take Cassandra's version at face value for "this kind of text is always suspect. Lies cluster to death like flies." Kelly declares that it is not a foregone conclusion that Austen's malady was fatal or that her end was near: ​"We may have to consider the --frankly horrifying--possibility that Jane's illness wouldn't, on its own, have proved fatal, or not so soon, that it might have been the drugs, and only the drugs, that killed her."

    Was Austen in fact merely quite ill and not at death's door? Based on the description left to us, I believe she was dying. Literature is actually filled with descriptions of "final death throes" and "final struggles." It is a well-documented fact that death is often preceded with an acute period of restlessness. The following explanation from a hospice website exactly parallels what Cassandra wrote:
Shortly before death some people become restless, agitated and confused, however, they are usually unable to tell us why. This is known as terminal restlessness and it often occurs within the last few days of life and affects nearly half of all people who are dying.
   There may be a variety of causes for this and sometimes sedative drugs are needed. A calm, quiet and stress-reduced   environment, with reassurance from those who are close to the person, can often help to relieve this symptom.
​    I witnessed this phenomenon myself during the recent death of a family member who chose to die at home. Cassandra's description strikes me, based on my experience, as exceedingly accurate, down to the detail of the dying person lying in an awkward position, despite one's best efforts to help them get comfortable.  After our relative spent an miserably restless night, trying to climb out of bed when he could no longer support himself, we anxiously called the hospice care team. The nurse came and explained that this was a sign that the end was coming. Fortunately, the restlessness soon subsidized, and my relative passed away less than 24 hours later.
    Seeing your loved one thrash about murmuring on their death bed is a harrowing experience and naturally you would want to ease their suffering with  pain medication. But it does not follow that whatever dose Austen received was entirely responsible for the stillness which followed the period of restlessness--again this is a natural part of the dying process.
   I see nothing suspicious about Austen's end and no reason to assume, as Dr. Kelly suggests, that Austen's "depressed respiration" at the end was due to an opiate overdose and not Cheyne-Stokes breathing, which is another extremely common and widely-reported harbinger of approaching death.
    It would be charitable to lay Dr. Kelly's eagerness to accuse others of a crime, where no crime occurred, to her respect for Austen and her wish, which we all share, that she had been as long-lived as the rest of her family.