Lona Manning's blog

CMP#63 Money as a Plot Device

8/4/2021

Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. Lately I've been placing Jane Austen's novels in the context of other novels written during the same period. Click here for the first in the series.

"And you know there is generally an uncle or a grandfather to leave a fortune to the second son.” [says Mary Crawford]
“A very praiseworthy practice,” said Edmund, “but not quite universal. I am one of the exceptions, and being one, must do something for myself.”
-- Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

CMP#63 Money as a plot device, or the rich uncle

Reading the Marriage Contract

Money, or more specifically the lack of money, comes up in every Jane Austen novel. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, has financial security but Jane Fairfax doesn't. The Bennet sisters are saved from poverty and spinsterhood by good marriages. Young Lieutenant Wentworth doesn't have enough money to be an approved contender for Anne Elliot's hand. Fanny Price is condescended to by her wealthier Bertram cousins. Catherine Morland isn't rich enough to suit Henry Tilney's father.
Money could be an important plot driver. Mr. Wickham turns his attentions from Lizzie Bennet to Mary King after Miss King acquires ten thousand pounds. Willoughby betrays Marianne Dashwood for Miss Grey and her fifty thousand pounds.
Even beyond romance, money dictates the opportunities for Austen's characters. Anne Elliot's father is a spendthrift, so the family must rent their estate and move to Bath. The poverty of Miss Bates and Mrs. Smith affects the roles they play in Emma and Persuasion respectively.

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CMP#62 Shocking Compared to Whom?

7/27/2021

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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. Folks today who love Jane Austen are eager to find ways to acquit her of being a woman of the long 18th century. Click here for the first post in the series.

CMP#62 Shocking Compared to Whom?

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle-class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

-- from "letter to Lord Byron", by W.H. Auden

Many-tongued Rumour

“What is exceptional about Austen as a novelist is that she tells us exactly how much money each of her characters has.”
So says an October 2020 New Yorker article, and who would dispute it? Mr. Darcy's entrance into the ballroom was followed by a "report which was in general circulation within five minutes... of his having ten thousand a year." Everyone seems to know how much money everybody else has: Mr. Collins knows Elizabeth is only entitled to one thousand pounds in the four percents after her mother’s death.
A poem by W.H. Auden, quoted above, surmises that Austen might be shocked to meet Lord Byron in heaven, but she is herself shocking because she's so frank and unsentimental about "the economic basis of society." However, as I’ve come to realize, the statement: “Jane Austen’s novels are preoccupied with money” is incomplete and somewhat misleading. The statement should be, “Jane Austen’s novels, like most novels of her time, were preoccupied with money.” There was nothing exceptional about it.
Many, many, novels of this period include exact descriptions of incomes, expectations, disappointments, and inheritances, especially as they relate to someone’s ability to get married. You can literally pick any18th-century novel at random and find passages referring to these things. And, just as in Sense & Sensibility, the financial circumstances of the main characters are often laid out in the introductory passages. Here is a sampling:

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CMP#55 Constance: the Weeping Heroine

6/30/2021

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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"

  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.

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CMP#54 Amelia Mansfield: the fainting heroine

6/23/2021

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“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?

"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).

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CMP#63 Money as a Plot Device

CMP#62 Shocking Compared to Whom?

CMP#55 Constance: the Weeping Heroine

CMP#54 Amelia Mansfield: the fainting heroine

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