Clarissa

In addition to learning about Jane Austen and her times, I have undertaken to read some of the books that she would have read. Tom Jones, which we know from the letters she read in her teens, was my first step, and a novel I should have read long ago on its own merits, because it is hilarious. Now I am embarked on Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and finding it a bit more of a slog, not least bit hilarious, but with its own dark fascination.

I realized why few, if any, ever read "Clarissa" in an English class when I saw it waiting for me on the reserve shelf at the library. It is huge! As in, War and Peace huge, without the excuse of having years, generations, continents, an entire war (and a peace) to cover. As in 1,536 pages huge. What is more amazing, the events described in it take place over only nine months, giving rise to the possibility that a slow reader might take longer to read the action than Clarissa and her fictional friends did to live it. Being an epistolary novel adds to its real-time feeling. It is like watching paint dry, only slightly more suspenseful, I marvel to myself, and yet somehow I keep reading it.

In some ways, I am reminded of a fairy tale. Clarissa Harlowe, beautiful, intelligent and virtuous, is shunned and abused by her relatives for refusing to marry the horrid man they have selected for her. Envy seems to be at the root of the problem: Clarissa's grandfather has left her considerable property, passing over his sons and two other grandchildren, which has sent Clarissa's odious brother and sister, who never liked her anyway, over the edge. Some in Clarissa's family --her mother, and an aunt -- secretly sympathize but are too beaten down to stand up for her. Complicating Clarissa's situation is that the notorious rake Lovelace, whom the sister at one point aspired to marry despite his "faulty morals," has turned his attentions to Clarissa. The family cannot abide Lovelace, because he nearly killed Clarissa's brother in a duel (long story). The obsessive concern that she will run away with Lovelace anyway, thus making them all look like fools, leads to the decision to essentially imprison her in the house.

A key plot point of "Tom Jones" is also the effort to marry a virtuous young woman (Sophia Western) off to a man she loathes, making me wonder how often this problem occurred in real life at the time. Or was it simply a fictional device with a lot of potential? In "Pride and Prejudice," this motif appears, but with a highly comic treatment, when Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth Bennet. More seriously, Fanny Price feels pressure to accept Henry Crawford in "Mansfield Park," but it is of a far more subtle kind. And no Austen parent would think of accepting on behalf of the young women, as Sophia and Clarissa's fathers do without hesitation. Whether the status of women changed so much in 50-60 years, or Austen's novels are simply truer to life, cannnot be determined from the information given.

Most Brilliant Jane Austen Fanlit

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Whose Jane Austen?

Ever since there have been Jane Austen fans, they have been split between two warring camps, each convinced that the others are idiots and/or snobs, liking Jane Austen for all the wrong reasons.

In our own time, this could be best described as the split between the people who really, really, really like that scene in the A&E 1995 version of "Pride and Prejudice" in which Colin Firth dives into a pond at Pemberely, perhaps even to the point of not realizing there is no such scene in the book -- perhaps because they never read the book! -- and the people who... well, who think those people are airheads.

Although this divide may have become more acute since the 1990s and the rash of Jane Austen adaptations for TV and film that have followed, it is in fact far older, and relates to a certain duality in how Jane Austen has been perceived ever since the beginning, relates in fact to the very ambiguity at the heart of her work. Was she a sweet, genteel lady who wrote light, romantic novels about young women's husband-hunting? Or was she one of the greatest geniuses ever to write in English, producing subtle work of surpassing irony under the guise of writing light, romantic novels about young women's husband-hunting?

To which I can only reply, yes. One reading need not rule out the other. A reader (or viewer) drawn to Jane Austen for the cozy, romantic aspects of her work may later find there is more to it than immediately meets the eye. Or not, in which case they have still had a lot of fun, and a glancing encounter with something more bracing than Harlequin romances.

It is, of course, the serious people who really can't stand the Pemberley-pond camp, both because they fear being lumped with them, and because they feel that these morons are somehow unworthy of their Jane, and are indeed sullying her with their regard.

About Money

Money is important in Jane Austen's world, but usually the general is more important than specific. Mr. Bingley of Pride and Prejudice is considered a very good catch with an income of £4,000 or £5,000 a year. But when people learn his friend Mr. Darcy has an income of £10,000 a year, they are speechless, agog, seriously impressed. Thus by the context of people's reactions, we know the difference between the two incomes, without really knowing (or needing to know) what £10,000 or £5,000 would mean in today's money. Also notice that Darcy and Bingley are friends, occupying the same general social position, doing the same sort of things. This would not necessarily be true in our world, if one friend, say, made $30,000 and the other $60,000.

Likewise, Emma Woodhouse, with a fortune of £30,000 (notice how the woman's wealth is expressed in a lump sum, while men's wealth is expressed as annual income, as was the convention of the time) is the wealthiest of Jane Austen's heroines. (While Jane Austen's actual circumstances, as the unmarried daughter of clergyman living with her widowed mother, were closer to the unfortunate Miss Bates.) But what does Emma's £30,000 mean, really? It makes Mr. Elton want to marry her, but as she herself reflects, failing to win Miss Woodhouse with £30,000, he would be just as happy to marry Miss Someone Else with £20,000 or £10,000. A fortune of £10,000, as I recall, is what sparks Mr. Wickham's sudden interest in Mary King ("that nasty little freckled thing," as Lydia calls her).

Small amounts of money are not as important in Jane Austen, but I am sure I am not the only American reader to be baffled by English money. What, exactly, is a quid? A bob? How many shillings in a pound? Where do guineas fit in? This I have finally gotten around to figuring out, with the help of "All Things Austen," an amazing two-volume guide I recommend to everyone with an extra $157.95 they are unsure of how to wisely spend.

Old-style English money consisted of pounds, shillings and pennies (pence). Twelve pence in a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound, thus 120 pence in a pound. They were abbreviated as £, s and d, of which only the £ makes any sense to me. A guinea, which seems a most unnecessary unit of money, was 21 shillings. Confusing the issue were coins like the crown (five shillings) and the half-crown (2s, 5d), the half guinea (10s, 6d), the third guinea (7s) and the half pound. As well as the sixpence, immortalized in the nursery rhyme.

But I think the shilling level is what makes it most confusing for modern readers conditioned to think in the decimal world of dollars and cents. Those stockings Jane mentions in a letter that cost 4s 3d a pair. (4 x12 + 3): Why not just say they cost 51 pence? Who knows, but people did not, as the literature makes clear.

Reading Between the Biographers

In her lifetime Jane Austen was not an unsuccessful writer -- she did all right, though not amazingly well -- despite not publishing a book until 1811, the year she turned 36. It only seems that way, because her rock-star status did not come until much later. (We cannot avoid feeling astonished at the obtuseness of her contemporary readers, who did not recognize her genius and rate her higher than say, Maria Edgeworth. What is Castle Rankrent, anyway, these days, to anyone except an obscure reference in The Great Gatsy? Who actually reads Sir Walter Scott, who doesn't have to?)

Jane Austen did all right. But she was not famous. Quite the contrary, for, as is well known, during her lifetime the authorship of her books were ascribed to "A Lady" (Sense and Sensibility, her first published work) and later to "The Author of Sense and Sensibility" or "The Author of Pride and Prejudice." She sought to avoid not merely being famous, but being known at all. And this raises two questions. One is, why? And the other is, what are some strange effects this had?

The why is fairly simple. Jane Austen came from a social class and a milieu in which respectable woman did not seek public notice. She was no Mary Wollstonecraft, nor was meant to be; compared to her Fanny Burney was a wild woman.

The effects it had are more complicated to relate, but I think the primary one, at least the one I keep going back to, is this: Everything, really that we know about Jane Austen, in a first-person, I've-met-her sort of way, comes from her family. Not only that, but almost entirely from relatives of the generation that followed hers, nieces and nephews who remembered her from childhood, or young adulthood, as a friendly maiden aunt. People, in late middle age, combing their memories for recollections of their now quite-famous Aunt Jane.

Can you possibly imagine anything more doomed than that? Less certain to provide a one-sided and limited view of a person who had to be, at the very least, pretty complex?

And it gets worse. Jane Austen, b. 1775, came of age in the robust, earthy 18th century intellectual climate of Johnson, Boswell, Fielding et al. A world where respectable people could still joke about subjects like bedbugs, drunkenness and illegitimate births. Her nieces and nephews lived under Queen Victoria, reading Dickens and George Eliot. A nagging sense that Aunt Jane was perhaps not entirely genteel, not altogether The Angel in the House, seems to suffuse their memories. Not in what they say, but what they don't.

Of course, we do know about her from her own letters. But that is a subject for another day.

What, Another Book About Jane Austen?

Yes, even I wonder, could there possibly be anything more to say?

Jane Austen fanlit avant la lettre apparently began almost 100 years ago, according a review from The Times of London. In 1913, to be precise, with "Old Friends and New Fancies" by Sybil G. Brinton, whom The Times snidely describes as "an author of towering obscurity" (Hey, that could describe a lot of us). The book

"takes three dozen characters from the original novels, intertwines their lives and ties up the loose ends with three marital knots.

In an ideal literary world, the resulting jamboree would be full of wry irony. (“Isn’t that General Tilney over there? Didn’t we last meet him at Mansfield Park?” “I fear you are mistaken, my dear, we met him at Northanger Abbey.”) Brinton, however, does not do wryness. For all the ingenuity of her game of literary Consequences, the result is bland and, to nonaddicts (who can’t understand all the fuss about Jane) bewildering."

But I want to read it anyway. I propose to look for it just as soon as I finish with Tom Jones, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and The Truelove. But the book I really want to read is my own, the one I am currently at work on, in which two people from 2089, a doctor (and Jane Austen fan) and a professor (and amateur actor) travel back to 1815 as part of a top-secret mission with a title not unlike the title of the blog that you, dear reader, have before you. Their mission is to recover for posterity and literary historians the lost letters of Jane Austen, the ones Cassandra burned before she died because they were apparently too juicy, too mean, or too something. In addition, they hope to resolve the mystery of what Jane Austen really died of at the relatively tender age of 41.

I blame the genesis for this book on two things: Patrick O'Brian and insomnia. The former has consistently amazed me with his seemingly supernatural ability to immerse himself in the world of the early 19th century, with how his Aubrey-Maturin novels bear what must be such a staggering amount of research as lightly as a feather. The latter was the cause of my lying awake one night about 3 a.m. Having seemingly exhausted all other topics of thought, I found myself thinking about how the world of Jack Aubrey (a sea captain in the Royal British Navy) takes place offstage, as it were, a Jane Austen novel. (Is not his very name a subtle salute to her?)

The same time, the same country, the same social class. Two of her brothers were sea captains and eventually, admirals; they could have met Jack Aubrey, had he actually existed. In "Persuasion," the last completed Austen novel, the heroine marries a sea captain. In one POB book, the fictional Aubrey commands a real ship, the Leopard, that at one point had been under the command of Jane Austen's older brother Frank.

I thought about the contrast between the two worlds, so close but so far apart, one full of storms, cannon fire, shipwrecks, captivity and trips to exotic ports. The other finding its adventures in drawing rooms and conversation, in the chasm between what people say and what they think. Yet the real drama, in both worlds, is human nature.