Moving On

The Jane Austen Project has moved to Wordpress. Find it here.

File under: You never know, it might work.

Axis of Eva: Julie & Julia & Jane Austen

Recollections of the Vine Hunt

That is the James Edward Austen Leigh's first book, the success of which subsequently inspired him to write down his recollections of his Aunt Jane. I am trying to decide which is more astonishing: that he thought it more important to document how hunting practices had changed since his youth than to note down the living memories associated with one of the greatest writers in the English language; or that the book, which I expected to track down with great difficulty if at all perhaps in the noncirculating collection of the New York Public Library, is available digitally from the comfort of my own home, thanks to Google Books.

The Next Generation

When I started research for my novel involving Jane Austen, I was most interested in learning -- along with details of everyday living -- about Jane Austen's siblings, who loom particularly large in her life.

Cassandra, of course, her lifelong companion, perhaps the most influential but also the most mysterious.

My personal favorite -- he may have also been JA's favorite -- is the charming and mercurial Henry, whose residence in London is important to JA's writing career, since he is the one she stays with when she goes to town to deal with publishing matters. He was also instrumental in dealing with those publishers. He was the only one of the Austens to live in London (although Edward went there from time to time, like every proper wealthy gentleman) and therefore it is to him we owe JA's experiences and impressions of London, which add so much to her novels despite their largely pastoral setting.

James, the oldest brother and the clergyman, was considered the writer of the family when they were all growing up, and is thought to have encouraged JA's writing. The vexed relationship with his second wife (everyone loved Mary Lloyd until he married her, and then she seems to have gone out of her way to annoy them all) seems to have also provided JA with some close-up insight into difficult people.

Edward, by virtue of being richer than anyone else, provided the raw material for JA's accounts of life in homes like Mansfield Park and Kellynch Hall, something she would not have had otherwise. And of course, from 1809 he provided JA and her sister and mother with a place to live, the stability of which appeared to fuel JA's creativity and productivity.

The sailor brothers, Francis and Charles, though away for long periods of time, were important and very well loved. They bring a dash of sea air and a flavor of the world outside the small towns where JA's life (and her novels) for the most part were set. Persuasion in particular but also Mansfield Park rely heavily on the details of naval officers' lives ashore.

But four of those siblings -- James, Edward, Francis and Charles -- also had children, and toward the end of her short life JA was starting to take particular interest in several of them, as I realize now, getting to the part of my novel that is set in Chawton and Alton in 1816 and 1817 and rereading the letters from that time.

Fanny, oldest daughter of Edward, (that's her likeness above, done by Cassandra) apparently had a special place in JA's heart, though from the evidence it is hard to say why. Around 1814-1815 she was writing her aunt seeking advice about her romantic life, which was as complicated as anything in an Austen novel and yielded a series of intense, very funny replies. But it is one of the very last letters JA wrote to her, in February 1817, that is my absolute favorite:

You are inimitable, irresistable. You are the delight of my life. Such Letters, such entertaining Letters as you have lately sent! Such a description of your queer little heart! Such a lovely display of what imagination does! You are worth your weight in Gold, or even the new Silver Coinage. I cannot express to you what I felt in reading your history of Yourself, how full of Pity and Concern and Amusement I have been. You are the Paragon of all that is Silly and Sensible, common-place and eccentric, Sad & Lively, Provoking & Interesting. -- Who can keep pace with the fluctuations of your Fancy, the Capprizios of your Taste, the Contradictions of your Feelings? You are so odd!-- & all the time, so perfectly natural -- so peculiar in yourself & yet so like everybody else! It is very, very gratifying to me to know you so intimately. You can hardly think what a pleasure it is to me to have such thorough pictures of your Heart. Oh! What a loss it will be, when you are married. You are too agreeable in your single state, as a Niece. I shall hate you when your delicious play of Mind is all settled down into conjugal & maternal affection....

JA did not live to see this happen. Fanny was married in 1820, to Sir Edward Knatchbull, a widower 12 years older than her who already had six children, bore him nine more, and lived to 1882, becoming very rich and grand, something of a snob, and in her last years, tragically senile and thus unable to contribute to the memoir that other members of that generation worked on.

Anna, oldest daughter of James by his first wife, and the same age as Fanny (both born 1793) was another favorite of JA's. At one point around 1814 she was working quite seriously on a novel, which she shared with Jane and Cassandra and their mother. JA's letters commenting on this work to her remain the clearest accounts we have of JA's own views about writing and are extremely interesting to scholar and layman alike for this reason. She is both encouraging and critical, always kind. (Though letters to Fanny sometimes contain catty comments about Anna, there are never any catty comments about Fanny to anyone, in any letters.) Anna, after an even more bumpy romantic career than Fanny, married a clergyman in November 1814 and started rapidly producing children ("Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is 30 --I am very sorry for her," JA observes to Fanny in March 1817, when Anna is pregnant with her third child.) Anna seems to have been smarter than Fanny, but more difficult.

James-Edward, James's second child and only son (born 1798), would, near the end of his own long life, write the first biography/memoir of JA, with the help of Anna and his younger sister, Caroline. He graduated from Winchester College (actually a high school) at the end of 1816 and looms increasingly large in her letters after that. He was also writing a novel and seeking his aunt's advice.

"He grows still, & still improves in appearance, at least in the estimation of his Aunts, who love him better & better, as they see the sweet temper & warm affections of the Boy confirmed in the young Man," JA wrote her friend Alethea Bigg in January 1817.

Caroline, his younger sister, born 1805, seems hardly old enough to remember JA, yet she provided some of the most vivid memories for her brother's book. She also carried on a lively correspondence with her Aunt Jane, starting about 1815, and was the recipient of the famous backward lettter of January 1817.

The Lady Vanishes

When I made a Wordle out of Chapter 21of The Jane Austen Project, the most obvious thing was that this is the first one where the words "Jane Austen" have been bigger than any other. (Word size, obviously, is based on how often the word appears in the text.)

Usually "Liam" has been the biggest word. I thought this was an interesting illustration of how a story I had conceived as being about traveling back in time to meet Jane Austen has turned out to be more about the relationship of the time travelers to each other, and to the new world they find themselves in. I also did not expect this book to be so much about sickness, with Death always lurking in the background.

Frankly, I was expecting it to be funnier. So much for that. (Can I make it funnier in rewrite? Get me rewrite!)

Jane Austen is hard to write about. She's a slippery fish. I am increasingly conscious of how many people I will annoy with my imagined idea of Jane Austen, if they ever get the opportunity to read this. Every person who loves Jane Austen has his or her own idea about what she was really like. Other fans, perhaps, they like not knowing much, that for Jane Austen, unlike many writers (names like Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath come to mind), the outsize myths about the life are not part of the story. The work stands on its own, solitary and fabulous, not unlike Shakespeare's. Which people can't even agree Shakespeare wrote.

Good vs. Good Enough

I don't know. All this long, horrifying time that I have been writing, or failing to write, Chapter 20, I kept thinking, what an astonishing piece of shit this chapter is! How did it come to this? How have I sunk so far?

But when I finally came to the end, turned the corner and saw it was done, I printed it out, sat down and read it and felt that, well, maybe it wasn't all that bad. It held my attention, even though I knew how it ends.

And to this moment, I do not know which impression is the correct one. They both seemed so vivid.

Both Funny and True

Fran Lebowitz on why people like Jane Austen for the wrong reasons.
Great but not developed sufficiently. She could write 20 pages on this subject and I would be so happy to read it.

Dusting Off the Desk

Lots of chatter in the blogosphere of what Jane Austen actually died of!

And many interesting people pursuing JA in their own special ways.

November was terrible for writing. Ghastly, forgettable. Today, staring down the barrel of the year-end, I finally emptied my mind of other things and sat down to concentrate on Chapter 20. The result was not amazing, but it was encouraging.

Onward.

@the Morgan Library

I went to the exhibit.

Actually, I joined the Morgan Library, so I could go repeatedly, the chance to see Jane Austen's actual letters being something that does not happen every day, even in New York. So I plan to go back.

Here, then, are my very first impressions: The exhibit is confined in too small a space. The Gillrays, however, are great. I had seen them reproduced in many books, and digitized in various British museums, but there is nothing like seeing an actual print, life-size, in front of you.

The letters of Jane Austen! Oh, what can I say? She has wonderful handwriting, tiny, perfectly even and perfectly spaced, with never a blot, matching to her what her younger relatives remembered of her being dexterous and clever in every handy undertaking: needlework, spillikins and cup-and-ball. Her handwriting is in fact so perfect you might be tempted to think this is something innate to people from the 18th century, were it not that Morgan had happened to also collect one of the letters to JA from James Stanier Clarke, the librarian to the Prince Regent, who wrote to JA after her visit to Carlton House, the Prince Regent's London home, in the fall of 1815. His handwriting is a sloppy, random disaster, something I might produce if you gave me a quill and ink. And he had been using a quill and ink all his life, unlike me. So perfectly spaced, perfectly composed handwriting, such as you see in the letters of Jane Austen or facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence are not ordinary, but examples of unusually orderly minds, and unusually dexterous hands.

@ the exhibit: numerous letters are on display, as well as other rare examples of words actually written by Jane Austen: manuscript pages of "Lady Susan," "The Watsons," the "Plan for a Novel, According to Suggestions From Various Quarters." And yet no transcriptions are provided, and I cannot help wondering why. It's not like we don't know what they say: they have all been transcribed. I have read them all. Despite the perfect evenness of JA's handwriting, they are not so easy to read that you can read them standing there over a glass case.

File Under Yes!

Oh, good Lord, Ms. Gold, I could not agree more.

Do you remember Becoming Jane (2007)? "Society expected her to marry," said the unforgettable trailer, "but Jane Austen had ideas of her own." You think? Austen was played by Anne Hathaway, a skeletal actress with a big smug grin. If Austen had looked like her, she would never have written a word – she would have been staring in a mirror, saying, "I am hot, I am smoking, I am babelicious." I remember the anger still. I remember thinking, Hollywood has raped Jane Austen. They have turned the patron saint of celibates into a hottie. Austen's writing was incidental, a stuck-on accident that unfortunately had to be mentioned. "What is Jane doing?" asks a character. "Writing," was the reply.

Chapter 19

First, the Wordle.

It's funny what, you know and what you don't know. I was startled when I wrote a sentence yesterday and suddenly realized, but hey, that's the end of that chapter! I was thinking it would go on for longer, but then I knew it had to end exactly where it did. And not just because I had written 17 pages, at least 10 of which will turn out to be superfluous (If only I knew which 10).

What am I doing? I wish I knew. Events are running away with me. And yet... I would not trade this experience for anything else, right now.

Oh, the Glory of It All

It's hard to write a good novel. It is even hard to write a bad one, though probably a little easier. Right now I find myself saddled with a new character who seems to have wandered in from Daniel Deronda, and not at all sure this is a good idea. When is a tangent just a tangent, and when is it a powerful message from your unconscious? I'll be damned if I know. Liam and Rachel stuck in St. Giles, breathing bad air and wondering how to get out. It's all a long way from Jane Austen.

Jack Aubrey Saves the Day, Again

More than a year ago, I wrote about the mysteries of 1815 food in this post. I was, however, an idiot, and I stand corrected, for there is actually a wonderful book from 1997 with descriptions, recipes and a dash of brio much beyond anything I can ever hope to achieve. And it was written by people who are practically my neighbors: a mother-and-daughter team out on Long Island.

What is this wonderful book, you might ask? It is Lobscouse and Spotted Dog (Which It's a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels). It answers many of the questions I have long had -- what is Soused Hog's Face exactly? (Exactly what you feared. And I now know how to make it, not that I ever will.) What is toasted cheese? And some I never thought to ask, such as how one might cook a rat, and what the result would taste like (surprisingly delicious, the authors contend).

These are the foods that Jack and Stephen ate. We do not recommend them to the unimaginative or faint of heart: some of them call for exotic, revolting, or fearfully expensive ingredients; many take upwards of a week to make; most of them cheerfully violate all the nutritional tenets of the health-conscious '90s. They are all, however, practical and authentic recipes, tested to our satisfaction (and to the detriment of our waistlines) in our own kitchens.

Time Passages

The premise of my novel, such as it is, is that Rachel Falk and Liam Ó Fionnmhacháin, respectively an M.D. and an English professor, travel back in time from 2089 to meet Jane Austen.

But I haven't spent a huge amount of time thinking about the physics problems posed by time travel or why does it have to be 2089, exactly, as opposed to 2809?

Hmm. Because you begin where you are. One has to start somewhere. Right now I am stranded in Chapter 19, which I have started at least six times. I keep writing more of it, as I commute, waiting underground trapped in the 1/ 2/3 IRT lines like someone in Dante's Inferno, but it is not adding up. I know where I need to go, but not how to get there.

Politically Incorrect Thought for the Day

Elizabeth Jenkins in 1938 (and subsequent later editions) wrote about how different the world of Jane Austen's was from our own. It was on the one hand much more beautiful ("plain elegance, uncompromising good taste, surrounded them with almost monotonous completeness") and on the other much more cruel ("But if we are in danger of breaking our hearts over this spirit of beauty which has vanished from the earth, it is also our duty to recall there existed with it, ignored or tolerated, a state of squalor and wretchedness which, to this relatively humane and hygienic age, is nearly as difficult to visualize as its heavenly obverse.")

And then she considers the implications of this:

That there was no cheap, sophisticated entertainment for the masses was part of a state of things in which thousands and thousands of people were less comfortable, less well dressed, less entertained, less informed than they are today; but it also meant that there was not a vast majority which by its very numbers imposed its ideas, its prepossessions and tastes on the world in which the educated person must now exist; the lower middle class, as it is the most considerable among consumers, dictates the canons of a taste which, by its preponderating bulk, has corrupted and destroyed the standards of language, of architecture, of entertainment and literature which once prevailed. This development has brought in its train a great increase in human happiness , and it has annihilated something so precious that its very absence has taken away from us the power to estimate its value. One may find an illustration of our gain and loss in the bear-ward who was Tony Lumpkin's companion at The Three Pigeons; he led a dancing bear, something of which we hate to think; but the tunes to which it danced were Dr. Arne's "Water Parted" and Handel's minuet from "Ariadne."

The Unpersuasive

Yesterday I watched the 2007 film version of "Persuasion" on my computer, unexpectedly finding it available and never having seen it before. Being a mild fan of the 1995 version I was curious as to how this one compared.

There is something to be said for seeing things enacted on film that so far have been viewed only inside one's head. Especially if you are interested in details of costume, setting and certain aspects of daily life that Jane Austen never stops to explain, like just how a bow is done, or want a good look at a carriage in motion. But there are certain aspects of this novel that are apparently simply not able to be expressed in film, and both versions, in the end, prove it.

The fingerprints of the characteristic preoccupations of the late 20th/early 21st century are all over these films. Historians in 100 years will watch them and see this clearly, but I don't have to wait; I have spent too much time mentally in 1815 not to be struck by it.

The 1995 version was notable for its emphasis on establishing shots of farm animals and workers, a subtle reminder of the economic basis of the good lives led by the main characters. Also for a general lack of glamour: characters (the gentry, not only the common people) often look as though they could use a shampoo, something that cannot be said of many movies. The actors, rather than being movie-star handsome, have faces that seem to belong in 1814, and they act up a storm.

The 2007 version, by contrast, is more glamorous, all smooth surfaces and lovely interiors. Yet they both start out promisingly enough, capturing the autumnal mood of the work, Anne Elliot's quietly brave despair. 2007 solves part of the exposition problem by giving Anne a diary and allowing her to make many of the author's less astringent observations; other authorial comments are put into the mouths of characters, to sometimes startlingly frank effect.

It is the last part of the book, when the action moves to Bath, that gives both filmmakers the most trouble. Jane Austen herself seems to have struggled with the ending, for an alternate chapter that she wrote and then decided did not work has survived, offering a rare glimpse into her working methods. (Both 1995 and 2007 choose to use an adapted version of this canceled chapter, evidently finding it more dramatic.)

The problem that both Jane Austen and her two film adapters seem to have struggled with is this: Anne is restricted by the codes and manners of the world she lives in. She can never see or speak to Wentworth alone except by chance, and then only in public, where she is subject to interruption by other people. She cannot call on him, but only hope he might call where she is. She cannot, even if her pride permitted, write to him, for unrelated people of the opposite sex never exchanged letters unless they were engaged. His letter to her, left on the table for her to pick up (in the ending Jane Austen chose to use) is therefore a dazzling example of his audacity and problem-solving abilities, even before it is read.

Anne Elliot's triumph, in Jane Austen's terms, is that she gets her heart's desire without violating any of her principles, without behaving improperly or appearing rude or foolish. (An Anne Elliot who did any of those things would not be Anne Elliot.) The real drama in this story is of the passionate and heartbroken spirit that rages beneath the calm, polite exterior.

That is apparently a hard thing to show in a movie. Both film versions, after starting with a well-crafted and exquisitely correct Anne Elliot, choose to dramatize her growing confidence toward the end of the story that Wentworth still loves her by having her go completely off the rails. Or to express herself, as the modern idiom would have it. Expressing oneself is so completely accepted as a virtue in modern life that it is hard to notice how pervasive this assumption is. Until you start having a proper and perfectly polite baronet's daughter of 1814 start expressing herself, and then its absurdity hits you like a slap of cold water on the Cobb at Lyme Regis.

In the 2007 version we have a lovely, dreamlike, but completely nonsensical scene near the end where Anne Elliot runs out into the street hatless (!) and runs (!) after Wentworth from the Royal Crescent (where the movie places her, though the Elliots lived in the less grand Camden Place) to the Pump Room, and back. Running all the way, like some scene that had wandered in from the cutting-room floor of Chariots of Fire. It might have worked better as a dream sequence, come to think of it, and could not have more comically trampled on the spirit of the book's ending. And let us not even mention the kiss, on the street, (!) once they have finally found each other and exchanged the look that tells all. That kiss! Why not just strip off their clothes and have sex right there in the Royal Crescent, which would have been just as historically accurate and probably more fun to watch?

In the 1995 version there is also a street kiss. Supposedly the kiss was included for American audiences and left out for British ones, something I cannot verify firsthand, though if true is certainly a point for the English. I thought the shot of the circus passing by as the happy couple finally connects was a nice touch, hinting in a possibly plausible way how magic and enchantment had finally come into Anne Elliot's life after 27 mostly arid and dreary years.

If only they could have left it at the circus. Instead, not content with the painfully ahistorical kiss, the 1995 filmmaker felt compelled to have Anne Elliot chase (!) after Wentworth as he leaves the concert. To hiss insulting remarks (!) about Mrs. Clay to her father that in the book she only thinks. To add a completely unneeded scene in which Wentworth, in front of everyone (!), at an evening-party (!) asks Sir Elliot for Anne's hand. (And the defeated William Elliot sneers and slinks away.) In short, to assume that the viewers are idiots and will not understand what has just happened unless they have just been given CliffsNotes.

Unfortunately, that might be true.

It's not over until there is a Wordle

And here it is.

I struggled with this Chapter. I still don't know if I really like it.

Jane Austen vs. Samuel Richardson

Damn. It is Sept 18.

It has been a busy month so far. Chapter 18 has not written itself, and no one else has appeared to write it, so I suppose I have to. I got several thousand words into it and then was unavoidably detained.

I have been slowly reading Pamela, though, in my spare time, and what a piece of work it is! First published in 1740, more than 30 years before Jane Austen was born, and a literary sensation in its day, it inspired Henry Fielding to write at least two parodies of it, Shamela and Joseph Andrews. (Tom Jones is in some sense also an answer to Pamela, though also much more, so that might be considered a third one.)

At the outset, I have to agree with Samuel Johnson, who said that you would hang yourself if you read Richardson for story. Clarissa keeps the suspense alive through hundreds of pages with its shifting points of view and deepening sense of foreboding and doom, but the reader has no such luck with Pamela. Once she comes back to Mr. B and agrees to marry him, her former would-be rapist, she spends many pages rejoicing in how happy she is and praying that she will be worthy enough for him. Great for her, but tedious reading, except as a reminder of the important lesson that conflict is the engine of plot. Once you have a happy ending, it is time to stop telling the story.

On the other hand, there are many interesting elements scattered like bread crumbs along the way. I am struck by how in both Pamela and Clarissa so much discussion and energy is expended on writing itself:

On paper and ink and quills and wafers hidden in various locations so they will not be found and confiscated, on letters concealed under stones and in walls and sewn in clothing against discovery. On letters stolen and forged. On the notion of writing as an act of self-assertion and even defiance by women, highly intelligent women in a society that seemed to place little value on intelligent women. What can he mean by it, I wonder as I read. What sort of person was he, really, to be so interested in such questions?

Richardson is also clearly obsessed with confinement, power (including the power of beauty) and rape. Here again, I cannot help wondering what sort of person he was. His personal demons seem to be left like smeary fingerprints all over his works.

And that is the big difference between him and Jane Austen, never mind all the other differences, because as many times as I read her, I can't really seem to find her. The challenge of being a clever woman surrounded by dolts; yes, it is reasonable to suppose she must have faced that problem, and it is one experienced by Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot in their different ways.

But to suppose that Jane Austen felt she was smarter than many people around her is not really a brilliant piece of literary detective work. What else? You search and come up empty. And you return wistfully, to the words of Virginia Woolf:

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

Onward

I haven't made a Wordle to commemorate it (though maybe I should), but I finished Chapter 17 yesterday.

It did not write itself.

It would not, as Admiral Croft said of Sir Walter Elliot, set the Thames on fire, yet potentially it contains some important elements that will prove useful later.

A larger point, though, is that this is the third time (in a row) that I finished a chapter in about two weeks. The sense of forward momentum seems more important right now than highly polished writing, at least I hope forward is the direction I am going. As opposed to say, sideways.

One thing I struggled with a lot in my first attempt to write a novel, a few years back, was keeping the whole thing in mind at one time. It seemed impossible. Actually, it is impossible, but some things I am doing differently this time around make it seem slightly less so.

Having chapter breaks is important. It provides a sense of accomplishment, however illusory (in many cases my chapter breaks are most arbitrary), to conclude a chapter, type it up and leave that half-page of white space at the bottom of the last page.

Writing fairly fast is also important, because the novel is kind of a living thing. It doesn't like to be left alone too long. It loses its urgency.

Having an outline is important. This was the single most valuable thing I took away from my time at the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop (which is not to say I did not take away many other valuable things, because I did). It's not that I have followed the plan, precisely, because the story has turned out to be more interesting than the plan -- there was a key plot element that I did not even anticipate until it drove up. It's not even that I consult the plan very often. I don't really seem to need to. But it's there. I can go back and look at it whenever I want to. It, too, provides a sense of accomplishment that is illusory and yet important.

Jane Austen, Secret Revolutionary

To readers in 2009 coming to her for the first time, Jane Austen's style of telling a story seems old-fashioned and quaint, lacking many elements that we expect in modern fiction, featuring characters whose situations seem strikingly unlike situations we would ever find ourselves in. But we need only read a few of Austen's contemporaries to see how innovative she actually was, how consistently she rejected many of the cliches of fiction in her own era, and even of some eras to follow. It's probably because I have just finished reading The Italian, with a plot as creaky and sputtery as an old Fiat, but I feel compelled to take a brief survey of what is conspicuous by its absence:

Coincidence as a plot element. True, chance encounters sometimes advance the action, but, as in Anne Elliot running into Wentworth at a pastry shop in Bath, they are never incidents that seem particularly unlikely.

Orphans of unknown parentage who turn out to be the children of someone significant to the plot. There is Harriet Smith, but wonderfully, we never learn whose child she is.

Garrulous, comic servants who slow the action down by telling long tales. Though I associate this with Cervantes, you will also find them in Fielding, Radcliffe and Edgeworth. Not to mention Dickens. The closest we get to a garrulous servant in Austen is the manservant of the Dashwoods, who shares with his employers his news of encountering Mr. Ferrars and his new wife, Lucy. It's worth reviewing what a masterpiece of economy that scene is, and admiring how effectively it keeps the suspense alive in a way that is tricky without actually being deceptive.

Fainting. "Run mad, if you chuse, but do not faint!" is the advice one heroine of the Juvenilia gives to another, and it is advice the authoress seems to have followed. Marianne Dashwood comes close to swooning, in her dreadful encounter with Willoughby in London. But doesn't. No one else I can think of ever faints, despite much provocation.

Bondage. Not a single character, with the exception of the unfortunate Eliza, lost love of Colonel Brandon's youth, is ever forced into an unwanted marriage, or forced into a carriage and carried off to a convent or a brothel. No one is ever even urged into an unwanted marriage, except perhaps Elizabeth Bennet, to Mr. Collins, by her mother, and that is played for laughs.

Supernatural elements. There really aren't any, except in Catharine Morland's imagination. No ghosts. No ominous portents, no shadows, no sinister monks, haunted houses or groans in the night.

Lost and found. No one loses a fortune and regains it, unless we count the widowed Mrs. Smith, who with Wentworth's help manages to regain control of her previously encumbered West Indian properties and thus raise herself from penury to a modest condition of self-sufficiency. No one's child or parent, thought to be dead, re-emerges at the end of the book, to great dramatic effect.

Her readers in 1813 might be just as baffled by Jane Austen as her readers in 2009, but in a different way. To them, perhaps, all these missing elements might make the novels seem strangely stark, passionless and dry. Certainly their lack annoyed the heck out of Charlotte Bronte.

Thus, although Jane Austen was in her personal conduct, and apparently in her political views, to the extent that we know them, conservative with a small c, it is fair to say she was wild at heart where literary conventions were concerned. I cannot help wondering how she would have turned out if she had been born into Fanny Burney's family. Or Mary Wollestonecraft's.