Reading 'The Italian'

Ann Radcliffe's masterpiece and the inspiration for Northanger Abbey. So far, just as silly as promised.

Why Northanger Abbey was accepted for publication in 1803 and not published for another 15 years (Henry Austen finally bought the rights back and had it published elsewhere) has long been a source of mystery in the world of things Austen. The introduction to the edition I am reading (which combines The Italian and Northanger Abbey into one gloriously compact, 688-page Signet edition) suggests that the publisher, having invested in the success of a highly profitable work, The Italian, did not want to risk publishing a parody of it, to possibly offend the author or damage the brand, as we would say today.

Indeed, though the introduction does not suggest this, if you subscribe to this theory, it seems possible Crosby bought the manuscript expressly to prevent it from being published. Sinister indeed!

But it also true, as the introduction points out, that Northanger Abbey is less a parody of Gothic novels than a mockery of their too-credulous readers, personified by Catherine Morland. It is, indeed, a novel about novel-reading, and as such sometimes strikes an astonishingly metafictional note:

"I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their  contemptuous censure  the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding -- joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest  epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read  by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is   sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust.  Alas! If the  heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?"

Yay! Another Chapter!

Another Wordle!

Never mind that in my haste I mispelled "Project." Everyone needs an editor, another thing we like to say in the newspaper business.

The Wordle Knows

Sometime when I finish a chapter I like to reward myself by making a Worldle.
Here it is.
I like the font, too; I believe that was Powell Antique.

Thinking About T.S. Eliot Today

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

Typing Chapter 14

I am quite excited, excessively diverted, about Chapter 14. It wrote itself, as we like to say in the newspaper business (a strange phrase, if you really think about it). Chapters 1 through 13 were produced with varying degrees of pain and suffering, while Chapter 14 ...well, it wrote itself. I seem to have just sat back and watched the words emerging from the end of the pen.

I would like to think this will continue to be the case, but it seems unlikely. I also wonder if my infatuation with Chapter 14, which seems amazingly exciting and full of energy at this moment, will survive the cold light of revision.

Whistling in the Dark

If reading fiction involves a willing suspension of disbelief, how much more writing it? I am in theory somewhere more or or less halfway through the rough draft of my novel, yet I still don't really feel like I know what I am doing. 

Usually afraid (because it might turn out to be so god-awful) to go back and reread what I have written so far, today I did, with the aim of putting it all in a giant file (giantfile.doc), which is how I learned I am up to 66,609 words.

Wow.

 Never mind the faintly satanic whiff of that word count. And never mind that I estimate one-half to one-third of those words are not needed (if only I know which ones.) It's a lot!  That's through Chapter 13! And the thing is, it is mostly  kind of interesting, even if I repeat myself at times (one sign that I wasn't looking back as I went along) and well,  if I don't find it interesting, how can I expect anyone else will?

Writing a novel, more than anything else I have ever done in life, is about making something from  pretty much nothing, as opposed to merely assembling something from constituent elements, the way lumber and concrete and pipes and nails come together to be  a house (not that I have ever built a house) or eggs and flour and sugar and a leavening agent, properly combined, can result in a cake. (I have made cakes, though not well, and not recently. Hey, I am busy here.)

But this is the thing. If you were halfway through a house, it would start to seem like a fait more or less accompli. People would drive by and see it, and ask, how's your house coming? Or the smell of the baking would fill your  kitchen and maybe waft down the corridor, if you lived in an apartment house, and you would notice it as you walked up from walking the dog or checking the mail. I'm not really having that feeling with The Jane Austen Project (though the support of my readers has been exemplary and more than I deserve: thank you, Carol, Bill and Czesia). It still seems like such a bubble, like a fragile thing that could disappear at any moment.

And that is why writing is like whistling in the dark, holding your breath past the graveyard, pretending everything is cool, because if you don't believe in it, who will?

England My England

It is mortifying to consider that I have been writing a novel set in England and had not actually been there for more than a decade, long before I had contemplated this project. Of course I am also writing a novel set in 1815, and I have not been there either, but there is less one can do about that. Last week I attempted to correct this oversight within the limits of my finances by flying to London. JA highlights:

A trip to the British Library, where Jane Austen's actual writing-desk, the one her father gave her when she was 19, is displayed under glass, along with part of the manuscript of "Persuasion,"and a bound version of "The History of England" with illustrations by Cassandra. (Wonderfully, the gallery has digitized this volume, and you can flip through it, magnify, and read a typed version of the handwritten work.

Chawton, home of the Jane Austen House Museum where JA lived from 1809 until shortly before her death in 1817. The graves of the two Cassandra Austens (sister and mother) are a short walk away in the yard of a beautiful old stone church, and the great house, still owned by descendants of Edward Knight, Jane's rich brother, can be glimpsed but not visited.

Winchester, where she sought medical care (in vain) and is buried in the cathedral.

Bath, setting of two novels and her home for about five years from 1800 to 1805. Also home to a Jane Austen museum, useful as an introduction if you don't actually know anything about Jane Austen, but not so much if you do. A visit to a museum of fashion history turned up a couple of circa-1815 dresses, but I was thwarted in my quest to learn more about Georgian underwear.

Bristol, not strictly JA-related, but home to a fascinating Georgian House Museum.

Hatchard's, booksellers since 1797, where I bought an interesting volume titled "The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England."

And, sort of on the topic, a very unusual museum about medical history.

I also took lots of pictures of Georgian houses, trying to imagine Rachel and Liam living in one, with sheep being driven through the streets instead of black taxicabs.