My book club is reading The Way We Live Now (1875) by Anthony Trollope, so I was in the mood to re-watch the 2001 BBC mini-series with Matthew Macfadyen playing the irredeemably useless and selfish Sir Felix Carbury. In the novel, Sir Felix invests a lot of time into trying to seduce Ruby Ruggles, a working-class girl, who deludes herself that he will marry her. Sir Felix and Ruby meet secretly in the woods. He “got his arm around her waist,” he “talked of love,” but he dared not "ask her to be his mistress.” In the mini-series, however, Sir Felix and Ruby (played by Maxime Peake) do more than chat and kiss and cuddle.
   The mini-series version seemed more probable to me. Of course Sir Felix wouldn’t waste his time travelling down to the country to see Ruby, or take her out to the music hall in London, if she didn’t put out.
​   And I wonder whether Trollope’s readers would have assumed the same. Yet I don't see Trollope hinting that they actually have sex. When push comes literally to shove in the novel, Ruby screams for help. She goes on to marry respectably. Her complacent fiancé asserts that she is a good girl. I think if she wasn't, she would have been fated to die by the end of the story.
     In Emma, Jane Austen references Goldsmith's short poem: "When lovely woman stoops to folly." I think Austen mentioned the "dying from shame" trope in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Recently, however, I’ve come across some examples of readers and critics arguing that there are some artfully hidden clues about sexual liaisons and love children in Jane Austen’s novels..

   Our heroine Fanny is perplexed and distressed. She needs time alone for reflection so she goes to a quiet room at Mansfield called the East room. But before we get to those internal deliberations, Austen pauses to describe the contents of the East room in a way that she perhaps never does for any other room in her novels. She also explains how Fanny came to use it as her own private day-room, even though Aunt Norris will not allow the comfort of a fire. We learn what having this room means to Fanny. (The relevant excerpt is posted at the end of this blog for anyone wanting a refresher).
   The East room is Fanny's refuge, her “nest of comforts,” even though it’s chilly and she has only battered school-room chairs to sit in and it’s decorated with drawings and furniture “too ill done for the drawing-room.” Here she keeps objects of sentimental value, like a sketch from her seafaring brother. She has her geraniums and her books. Fanny is a collector of books and she likes reading. As she pacing and thinking, Edmund visits her, letting her know he will relent and join the others in putting on a play, He and Fanny both know Sir Thomas would disapprove. Edmund awkwardly tries to segue out of the uncomfortable disagreement by talking about her books: “[Y]ou will be taking a trip into China, I suppose. How does Lord Macartney go on?”
   He babbles nervously: “And here are Crabbe’s Tales, and the Idler, at hand to relieve you, if you tire of your great book. I admire your little establishment exceedingly; and as soon as I am gone, you will empty your head of all this nonsense… and sit comfortably down to your table. But do not stay here to be cold.” And poof! he’s out the door, down the stairs and down the hill to Mary Crawford at the parsonage...

    Hi there! In previous posts some months ago, I took issue with Jillian Heydt Stevenson's post-modern interpretations of Mansfield Park and Emma. She contends that Austen portrays women as nothing more than commodities for sexual barter. Or perhaps "post-modern" is not the correct term. Postmodern literature is a "literary movement that eschews absolute meaning," therefore you cannot expound on what an author really "means." But I'm not a post-modernist. I can agree that everyone is entitled to their own opinion about Austen's meaning--but that includes me as well. If Heydt-Stevenson can give us a new decoding of Austen, then this pearl-clutcher can rebut. In this post I want to ask about the textual evidence for her theories.
   Heydt-Stevenson's upside-down interpretation of Austen means, for example, that Mr. Woodhouse is not a gently selfish invalid, but a pervert who wants to remember the words to a disgusting riddle so he can recite it to his virginal daughter and her virginal friend. Heydt Stevenson theorizes: “Mr. Woodhouse might have been a libertine in his youth and now suffers from tertiary syphilis." 
   Heydt-Stevenson’s evidence for this is Mr. Woodhouse's poor health and his fondness for a nice warm fire and some thin gruel. She overlooks anything he says, or anything people say about him, that doesn't fit her thesis... ​

     In my article about the riddle "Kitty, a Fair but Frozen Maid," in the online 2022 edition of the Jane Austen Society of North America journal Persuasions, I aim to demonstrate that modern interpretations of the "Kitty, a Fair but Frozen Maid" riddle in Emma are founded on false premises. Briefly, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson argues that the riddle has a subversive and obscene meaning which informs the entire interpretation of the novel. Here is a brief recap of Jillian Heydt-Stevenson's theory of the meaning of the riddle in Emma. I have additional background research material and thoughts here and here. You'll find the text of the Kitty riddle here.
  As I pointed out in my article, if the interpretation of the riddle is mistaken, then the interpretation of the novel built upon it is moot. Nevertheless, I will discuss that interpretation to resume an earlier discussion of Jillian Heydt Stevenson's book, Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions, Subversive Laughter, Embodied History. 
    Heydt-Stevenson is positing an advanced and subtle degree of allusive meaning in Austen's work. I'm not an expert on the evolution of the novel, but I don't see similar examples of subtle (and I mean subtle) allusion in the novels of Austen's time. There is allegory, yes, and satire, yes, but--well, see if you can follow the extended line of thought that Heydt-Stevenson thinks Austen’s first readers would have followed after they had read the one stanza of the Kitty riddle that appears in Emma...