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CMP#79  My Article in Persuasions On-line

12/16/2021

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Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. I’ve also been blogging about now-obscure authors of the long 18th century. For more, click "Authoresses" on the menu at right. Click here for the first in the series. 

CMP#79  Jane Austen and Elizabeth Helme
PictureAnne sees the Admiral on the streets of Bath
   The Jane Austen Society of North America has published my article "Admiral Croft and the Rich Uncle" in their December online edition of Persuasions. The article is about some striking similarities that I've come across between a 1799 novel by Elizabeth Helme and two of Austen's novels.
    I previously wrote about Elizabeth Helme in this blog post. She was a hard-working author who enjoyed considerable popular success although she died in illness and poverty.
​   I would not say that Helme was an "influence" on Austen in the sense that Austen emulated her. I would not compare Helme to Samuel Johnson, Cowper, or Fanny Burney--all writers whom Austen particularly admired. However, I think the evidence is clear that Austen read Helme's novels and made use of some of her dialogue, characters, and plot contrivances.
​  In this case, the novel I'm speaking of is called
 Albert, or, The Wilds of Strathnavern. It contains a character named Colonel O'Bryen, who I argue is the prototype of Admiral Croft.
​    Albert also makes use of private theatricals for plot purposes. Some Austen scholars have pointed to other contemporary novels which mention private theatricals as the possible source for Austen's use of Lover's Vows in 
Mansfield Park, but in Albert, the private theatricals are--as with Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford--used for the purposes of seduction.... 


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CMP#78  "The Common Trash of Novels"

12/5/2021

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"As for the common trash of novels, under which the press has groaned, which have introduced so wretched a taste of reading, and have been so hurtful to young minds, particularly of the female sex, they are unworthy to be named, except in the way of censure."

                               -- The English Review, Or, An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature, Vol V, 1785

CMP#78    A Novel Satire from 1818
PictureCatherine Morland engrossed in a novel
    When Jane Austen wrote in Northanger Abbey about book reviewers who "talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans," she wasn't exaggerating. Reviewers in periodicals and journals during this period often expressed their contempt for novels in exactly these terms. 
    Charles Robert Maturin was a writer of gothic novels. But he was also one of the critics who wrote dismissively of sentimental novels and the people who read them and wrote them.
    
“The path of novel-writing once laid open was imagined easy by all, and for about forty years the press was deluged with works to which we believe the literary history of no other country could produce a parallel. The milliner’s prentices who had expended their furtive hours, and drenched their maudlin fancies with tales of kneeling lords and ranting baronets at the feet of fair seamstresses, fair as they believed themselves to be, and in narrow back parlours as dark as their own, soon found it easy to stain the well-thumbed pages of a circulating library book with flimsy sentiments, and loose descriptions of their own..."
​       Just like Austen, Maturin wrote a pretty funny parody of this type of novel. Read on for more...


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    About the author:

    More about me here. 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 recent posts focus on my writing, as well as Jane Austen and the long 18th century. Welcome!


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