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"Ungrateful is a Strong Word": Father's Day Post

6/19/2022

Father's Day Post: "Ungrateful is a Strong Word"

For Father's Day, I just have one little thought to share: two of Austen's heroes, Henry Tilney and Edmund Bertram, are particularly prone to correcting their heroine's word usage. Have you noticed? Here are some examples:

In Mansfield Park, Edmund asks Fanny what she thinks about Mary Crawford's sarcastic remarks about her uncle at dinner the night before:
“I thought you would be struck, (says Edmund]. It was very wrong; very indecorous."
“And very ungrateful, I think.” [says Fanny]
“Ungrateful is a strong word. I do not know that her uncle has any claim to her gratitude; his wife certainly had; and it is the warmth of her respect for her aunt’s memory which misleads her here."

In Northanger Abbey, Catherine asks Henry and his sister, "But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?”

“The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.”
“Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.”
“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?”

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CMP#90 Poor Household Management

2/28/2022

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Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. Austen engaged with many of the same topics and issues that other novelists of the long 18th century wrote about, including the topic of female education. Click here for the first in the series.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek. -- Samuel Johnson

CMP#90 The Consequences of Poor Household Management

Suggested by Lady Catherine herself!

I have always been struck by the passage in Mansfield Park where Fanny waits in vain for a cup of tea upon her arrival in Portsmouth: "The next opening of the door brought something more welcome: it was for the tea-things, which she had begun almost to despair of seeing that evening. [Fanny's sister] Susan and a [servant] brought in everything necessary for the meal; Susan looking, as she put the kettle on the fire and glanced at her sister, as if divided between the agreeable triumph of shewing her activity and usefulness, and the dread of being thought to demean herself by such an office.”
Though their household is in chaos, the Prices still cling to the appearance of gentility. Pouring and serving the tea is genteel, carrying in the tray and heating the water is not. We recall as well how Mrs. Bennet is offended when Mr. Collins supposes that one of her daughters had a hand in preparing the dinner she served him. Financial disaster stalks the family if Mr. Bennet dies, but Mrs. Bennet wants the world to know that her daughters don't know how to cook. On the other side of the coin, Austen holds Lady Catherine De Bourgh up to ridicule for her vulgar interference in the minutia of Mrs. Collins' housekeeping. Such details should be beneath her notice.
The novels and conduct-books of the day were unanimous in agreeing that all young women should have some education in how to run a household, even if they never had to do any of the common household chores, and many warned that a genteel education which stressed accomplishments might be useful for the season of courtship, but it was a poor preparation for married life...

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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

Catherine 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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CMP#76: A Guide to Gothic Novels

11/22/2021

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Nobody is entirely safe; nothing is secure. The Gothic world is quintessentially the fallen world, the vision of fallen man, living in fear and alienation, haunted by images of his mythic expulsion, by its repercussions, and by an awareness of his unavoidable wretchedness.
-- from Ann B. Tracy's introduction

Book Review: The Gothic Novel 1790–1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs

“I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocketbook." [says Isabelle Thorpe to Catherine Morland] "Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”
“Yes, pretty well," [answers Catherine] "but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”

Isabella and Catherine are binge-reading gothic novels in Bath, a popular pastime when Jane Austen wrote her first draft of Northanger Abbey. Because of the long delay before its actual publication in 1817, Austen felt compelled to note in her foreword that "thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes."
A hundred years later, Isabella Popp tells us, Isabella's seven horrid novels had fallen into such obscurity that they "were often presumed to be invented by Austen." In 1927, "Michael Sadleir, a British publisher, novelist, and book collector, located copies of all seven novels." The last one to surface was Orphans of the Rhine.
This should be a reminder to us that prior to our digital age, finding copies of rare old book was a much more difficult and expensive challenge. Thanks to the internet and thanks to digitization, hundreds of these spine-chilling 18th-century novels are readily available, either for purchase or through your local university or community library.
You can also dive into the world of the gothic novel thanks to Professor Ann B. Tracy and her reference book: The Gothic Novel 1790-1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs.

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"Ungrateful is a Strong Word": Father's Day Post

CMP#90 Poor Household Management

CMP#78 "The Common Trash of Novels"

CMP#76: A Guide to Gothic Novels

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