LONA MANNING
  • Home
  • Books
    • Shelley Novella
  • Research
    • About Shelley
    • Peterloo
    • Kitty Riddle
    • 18th C. love poetry
  • Jane Austen
  • Blog
  • About Me
    • Publications
    • Teaching Philosophy

CMP#55  Constance: the Weeping Heroine

6/30/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. The opinions are mine, but I don't claim originality. Click here for the first in the series. For more about other female writers of Austen's time, click the "Authoresses" tag in the Categories list to the right.

CMP#55: "Very good and clever, but tedious"
Picture
    As Austen scholar Devoney Looser points out in her Great Courses series on Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s juvenilia shows that the young Austen was acquainted, not only with good books, but “with the opposite of great literature.”
   She read novels with “avidity” and wrote “incredibly perceptive send-ups of their tics and tropes,” such as the fainting heroine. If you haven't read Austen's juvenile burlesque of the sentimental novel, Love and Freindship, it's hilarious! 
    Austen loved novels, but she was also developing her ideas about what she wanted to avoid in her own novels. While she enjoyed a good sentimental novel, it seems that she decided very early on that writing sentimental novels with weeping heroines was not for her.
     In contrast to the weepy, fainting, heroines of sentimental novels, it is notable how seldom Austen's heroines cry--and it's her sillier female characters who are rendered helpless by a crisis, as for example Henrietta and Mary Musgrove when Louisa falls off the Cobb in 
Persuasion.
  Recently, I started in on the now-obscure novel Constance (1785), under the impression that it was written by Eliza Kirkham Mathews, an author I wanted to write a blog post about.  I was well into the novel when I learned that Professor Jan Fergus had studied the account-books of the publisher and has shown that, in fact, Mathews is not ​the author of Constance. 


Read More
0 Comments

CMP#54  Amelia Mansfield: the fainting heroine

6/23/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture

​“In this novel we certainly find much to admire, and much even to approve, but there are some things so improper as to disgrace and discredit the whole work… every person of good morals will concur in reprobating the indelicacy of certain passages…”         -- Review of Amelia Mansfield, 1809

CMP#54  Amelia Mansfield: Similar to Mansfield Park?
Picture"Art of Fainting in Company" by G.M. Woodward, 1797
    In my series of posts about Mansfield Park, I listed some of the theories about why Austen chose the name Mansfield. I won’t review them here, but I recently learned of another theory: In her entertaining and informative Great Courses series on Jane Austen, Professor Devoney Looser mentions a novel called Amelia Mansfield (English translation 1809) which features a niece controlled by her powerful family. I’m not saying that Looser is endorsing this particular theory; she mentioned it together with the more widely-held notion that the book is named after Lord Mansfield.
   Well, I was curious, so I read the novel to see what parallels there might be to Mansfield Park. I’ll get back to that connection later, but first, here’s a book review with spoilers:
    This is a sentimental novel in which the author, Sophie Cottin, skillfully arranges her characters in situations which exploit emotion and pathos to the fullest. I really have to admire the talent with which the author set up the doomed romance and the facility with which she wrung every last possible drop of angst, hope, and despair out of the various misunderstandings and obstacles.    
​    The whole fraught unfolding of events drew me in and kept me turning the pages to find out what would happen—despite not respecting the heroine and especially not liking the hero (for reasons I'll explain).


Read More
0 Comments

CMP#53   Father's Day Edition

6/16/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. The opinions are mine, but I don't claim originality. Much has been written about Austen. Click here for the first in the series.

Implicit Values in Austen: Duty to Parents: Father's Day Edition
 "My Father (he continued) is a mean and mercenary wretch -- it is only to such particular freinds as this Dear Party that I would thus betray his failings... My Father, seduced by the false glare of Fortune and the Deluding Pomp of Title, insisted on my giving my hand to Lady Dorothea. 'No, never,'' exclaimed I. 'Lady Dorothea is lovely and Engaging; I prefer no woman to her; but know, Sir, that I scorn to marry her in compliance with your Wishes. No! Never shall it be said that I obliged my Father.'" We all admired the noble Manliness of his reply.                                                                                                                            -- Love and Freindship, Jane Austen juvenilia
PictureMP Brock Illustration of Fanny learning from her father about Maria's elopement.
   The fathers of Jane Austen’s heroines are not that admirable on the whole. Fanny Price’s father is foul-mouthed and useless. Sir Walter Elliot would never win the Father of the Year award. 
      Elizabeth Bennet is too intelligent to be “blind to the impropriety of her father’s behaviour as a husband. She had always seen it with pain; but respecting his abilities, and grateful for his affectionate treatment of herself, she endeavoured to forget what she could not overlook, and to banish [his shortcomings] from her thoughts.”
​    However Austen's heroines might feel about their imperfect fathers, they keep their thoughts to themselves. 

   Anne Elliot’s “sense of personal respect to her father prevented her” from reminding him that he had taken Mrs. Clay, a poor widow of undistinguished birth, into his household, so he hardly had grounds for complaining about her friendship with the widow Mrs. Smith.
    Maria and Julia Bertram are outwardly dutiful but inwardly rebellious where their stern father is concerned. Austen makes a point of telling us so early in the book. Because the "flow of their spirits" is repressed in his presence, "their real disposition[s]" were unknown to Sir Thomas. Fanny Price feels guilty because she doesn't feel sad when he leaves for Antigua: "Fanny's relief, and her consciousness of it, were quite equal to her cousins'; but a more tender nature suggested that her feelings were ungrateful, and she really grieved because she could not grieve. Sir Thomas, who had done so much for her and her brothers, and who was gone perhaps never to return! that she should see him go without a tear! it was a shameful insensibility.” I have written elsewhere about how Austen shows sympathy for Sir Thomas.


Read More
0 Comments

CMP#52  In Defense of Colonel Brandon

6/10/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. Folks today who love Jane Austen are eager to find ways to acquit her of being a woman of the long 18th century. Further, for some people, reinventing Jane Austen appears to be part of a larger effort to jettison and disavow the past. Click here for the first in the series.  
Colonel Brandon: Old-Fashioned Guy or Moral Monster?
PictureMarianne gets a letter from Willoughby
     ​Scholars generally agree that Sense & Sensibility began life as an epistolary novel, a novel in letters. This is a form of novel which was rapidly losing popularity at the time, which may be why Austen re-drafted it as a narrative.
     It is puzzling to try and backwards-engineer the 
Sense & Sensibility we have today as an epistolary novel – who is writing letters to whom? The critic Brian Southam surmised that Elinor and Marianne each had a girl friend, a confidante, that they wrote to, which means that in the re-write these best friends were excised. I doubt it; I don't think Austen would eliminate two major characters from a book. I think it's more likely that Marianne and Elinor are separated for most of the time and are writing to each other. Perhaps only Marianne went to London with Mrs. Jennings, in pursuit of Willoughby, and poured out her hopes, her fears, and her final betrayal in letters to Elinor.
   With such a version, you wouldn't need Margaret, the third sister, as a character because as I noted in my Mother's Day post, Margaret's only useful function in the novel is to keep her mother company when both of the older girls go to London. So perhaps Austen didn't edit out two female friends, maybe she edited in Margaret. ​


Read More
0 Comments
<<Previous

    RSS Feed

    About the author:

    I blog about my research into Jane Austen and her world, plus a few other interests. Welcome! My earlier posts (prior to June 2017) are about my time as a teacher of ESL in China (just click on "China" in the menu below). More about me here. 


    Categories

    All
    18th Century Novel Tropes
    Authoresses
    Book Reviews
    Books Unreviewed Til Now
    China
    China: Sightseeing
    Clutching My Pearls
    Corvey Collection
    East & West Indies & Slavery
    Emma
    Humour
    Jane Austen
    Laowai At Large
    Mansfield Park
    Northanger Abbey
    Parody
    Persuasion
    Postmodern Pushback
    Pride And Prejudice
    Religion & Morality
    Sanditon
    Sense And Sensibility
    Shelley
    Teaching

    Archives

    August 2023
    July 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    October 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    January 2019
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    May 2017
    January 2017
    April 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014


    RSS Feed

    © Lona Manning 2023
Proudly powered by Weebly