Meet the Austens

In writing Chapter 9 of the (very) rough draft of my novel, I have finally got to the part where Rachel and Liam meet Jane Austen. I wasn't exactly expecting it to happen exactly where it did; it just suddenly seemed, as I was writing, that it had to be. In a novel of 25 to 30 chapters (I'm guessing) the arrival of Miss Austen, ostensibly the subject of the book, might seem a little late at this point.

But if I set out to write this book in hopes of answering through fiction a question that is unknowable through more rational methods of inquiry -- namely, what was Jane Austen like? -- it was only at this point that I felt prepared to hazard a guess. I had to spend a lot of time working through other questions: what is it like to be in 1815 London? What is Henry Austen like? How do people eat and use the bathroom and shop for clothing and amuse themselves and think about things?

And more and more as I write I realize that Miss Austen is, after all, only the MacGuffin, the device that propels the plot, which is actually about...well, that would be telling.

What is Jane Austen like? Like other people, only more so. I think of what Virginia Woolf said about her:

Here was a woman about the year 18oo 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.

Country Gentry

Last week we assumed the life of country gentry: Staying in the gracious home of wealthier relatives, paying visits, attending concerts, taking long walks in the woods with the dog. And, of course, not working, because otherwise how do you have the time to do all that, and really enjoy it? Now, alas, it is back to reality. I found myself thinking about what a broad margin Jane Austen had to her life, for all her worries about money and her relative lack of autonomy, for all the social restrictions that hedged her in.

Now I am reading another Austen-inspired fiction. Actually it is not entirely fictional: In Cassandra & Jane the author is writing from the perspective of Jane's sister, Cassandra, more than 20 years after Jane's death and nearing her own end, looking back at life with Jane and sorting her letters into two piles: those to be burned and those that can survive.

That destruction, of course, is a major sore point with Austen enthusiasts everywhere, and it's a brilliant idea to attempt to fictionally restore them. As she retells the story of Jane Austen's life, in a clearly well researched way, made-up excerpts from letters, filling in the tantalizing biographical gaps, mingle with excerpts from real ones.

The two major challenges this author poses for herself: to immerse herself in the mind and worldview of Cassandra Austen, a person living nearly 200 years ago, and to write letters (or fragments of letters) that Jane Austen might plausibly have written. Both are hard, but the second is much harder.

I haven't written about Jane Austen's letters here, though I think about them all the time. They are the main source of information about her personal and emotional life, and if you read enough biographies you see the same fragments quoted over and over. The trouble is that Jane Austen, a master of irony in her novels, is an even more ironic and unreliable narrator in her letters, particularly the ones to Cassandra, which are probably the bulk of those that exist. You can vividly see the quicksilver play of her mind at work, riffing on the trivialities of daily life with deadpan humor. But is she actually joking, sometimes?

Notes From Underground

Increasingly it seems that things fall into only two categories: good for TJAP or bad for TJAP. For example, reading.

Good for TJAP: Novels written (in English) before 1820 or dealing accurately with this period. Books somehow pertaining to Regency-era England.

Bad for TJAP: All other reading material.

Reading has, in fact, taken a hit over the past few weeks as I have made the astonishing discovery (at least, it astonished me) that it is actually possible to write in the subway. I used to consider this time useful only for reading. Now I can work on my draft. It's crucial, of course, to get a seat; I also do better if I have enough space to freely move my arm and am far enough away from my fellow passengers that I don't feel they are reading over my shoulder. (And wondering what kind of sad maniac they are sitting next to, who is earnestly writing in neat print in a marble notebook, phrases like "You should have him bled, Miss," she said.) But really, the main thing is getting a seat. I can write standing up on the platform, but not on a moving express train.

All I am really reading these days are the newspapers, fascinated as I am by the continuing slide of the world economy. It's like watching history being made before my eyes. Which has nothing to do with TJAP (therefore, bad for TJAP) I suppose. Though I do find myself thinking about the collapse of Henry Austen's bank in 1816, as well as wondering about the world of 2089 from which Rachel and Liam travel back from. I like to think that 2089 humanity would have solved the pesky problems that beset us now, like climate change, financial panic, war and religious intolerance. Though, from only the most cursory glance at history, I can't imagine why that would be the case. Inventing a time machine, which would involve only a major rewrite of the laws of physics, actually seems likelier than that.

I don't really dwell on the world that Rachel and Liam live in because that isn't what TJAP is about. But one must suppose that only a world in which people have solved most of the big problems would there be the luxury to worry about little ones, like, what was in all those letters Cassandra burned?

The End of the Affair

I have finished "Clarissa" and am now coming out, blinking,into the sunlight. It was summer when I started it and now it is fall, at least it feels like such at this latitude. Babies have been born; famous people have died; vice-presidential nominees have emerged onto the national stage and been made fun of.

In the end it does start to verge on self-parody: the relentless perfection of Clarissa begins to grate on one. It happens, in fact, at the point she dies, which is about 200 pages from the end. Once that inimitable voice is silenced, the myth-making takes over. But as long as she is alive, her perfection seems possible -- she is so clearly working on self-mastery, on trying to be the best version of herself within the dreadful situations she is faced with that it somehow seems heroic and fabled rather than melodramatic and absurd.

I seem to have wandered a long way from Jane Austen, though I can make the argument that reading a key work of the century to which Austen was born into is important to understanding what shaped her. (Even though "Sir Charles Grandison" was supposedly actually her favorite work by Richardson; it explores the idea of a perfectly virtuous male character and got terrible reviews from both Wikipedia and Samuel Johnson.)

I feel a bit bereft. I am not sure what to read next.

Good Lord

Going to renew "Clarissa" for the third time (which you can conveniently do online at the Brooklyn Public Library) I discover that I cannot renew it, because someone else has requested the book. This raises two immediate questions:

Can I finish the next 200 pages in two days, in time to avoid library fines? (I think yes, if I am willing to basically not do anything else.)


Who else in Brooklyn could possibly want to read "Clarissa"? It is a borough of 2.8 million people, but still. Come on. (I would like to think they have been reading TJAP blog, but that is even more unrealistic than that I can avoid library fines.)

Worth Reading, If I Can Find Them

Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography
P.D. James
(this one I have actually read already, soon after it came out seven or eight years ago, before I became a Jane Austen fanatic and was merely a P.D. James fanatic. Apparently she talks about how "Emma" is like a detective story. I had forgotten that part.)


The British Housewife: or, the Cook, Housekeeper's and Gardener's Companion
By Martha Bradley. Prospect books, 1997.
309 pages. Paperback. $19.

Almost Another Sister: Fanny Knight, Jane Austen's Favourite Niece
By Margaret Wilson.
George Mann of Maidstone, 1998.
x + 175 pages. Illustrations. Paperback, $20.00.

Fanny, Fanny, Fanny. Author of that so-mean letter about Jane in your old age. What happened? I hope this book will explain.

Jane Austen’s “Outlandish Cousin”: The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide

By Deirdre Le Faye.
The British Library, 2002. 192 pages.
10 B/W illustrations. Hardcover. $35.00.

Many biographer see Eliza de Feuillide, whose second husband was none other than Henry Austen, as the fictional inspiration for Mary Crawford.

1815 Food

Soused pig's face!

It's Captain Jack Aubrey's favorite dish. In one of her letters, Jane Austen describes having just eaten some. But what is it, actually? Obviously there are pigs involved. My initial guess would have been that alcohol was somehow involved in the cooking process, like the 1815 equivalent of drunken chicken, but my limited Internet research, which led me to this fascinating book, suggests this is not the case:

SOUSED PIG’S HEAD AND FEET.

Clean them extremely well, and boil them; take for sauce part of the liquor, and add vinegar, lime or lemon juice, salt, cayenne, black and Jamaica pepper; put in, either cut down or whole, the head and feet; boil all together for an hour, and pour it into a deep dish. It is eaten cold with mustard and vinegar.

In fact, the first definitions listed of souse as a verb are "to pickle, or to plunge or steep in a liquid, or to make wet." The slang sense of "to make or become intoxicated," which is the one I thought of first, is only No. 4.

I've been thinking a lot about food in 1815 lately, having been writing a chapter in which my time-traveling characters go to dinner at Henry Austen's house. In general, they find the food of 1815 hard to get used to, particularly since in their world of 2089 nearly everyone is a vegetarian, and meat-eaters are regarded with the kind of pitying disdain that cigarette smokers face today. (I am imagining the world of 2089 with certain politically correct, eco-friendly trends of today taken to ridiculous extremes.)

In 1815 everyone was a locavore; there was no choice in the matter. My characters probably approve of this, but not so much Mrs. Dalgairns's merciless way with overcooking vegetables, i.e.:

TO BOIL LARGE WHITE CABBAGE.

Wash and clean them thoroughly; if large, cut them into quarters, or divide them; put them on in boiling water, and throw in a little salt; boil them for nearly two hours.

TO BOIL YOUNG GREEN CABBAGES.

Wash and clean them well; put them on in boiling water with a little salt in it, and let them boil quickly from three quarters to nearly an hour; serve with melted butter.


Quickly boil for nearly an hour? How is that quick? More proof of what we already suspected, that the 19th century had a different sense of time. Or maybe it just means a rapid boil?

Another fascinating difference: The Practice of Cookery has, in addition to a chapter about pork, a chapter about pigs: How to care for them and what to feed them, how to handle them after they are killed. (There are no instruction for actually killing the pig, making me wonder whether the potential readers of the cookbook outsourced this job, or it was something so obvious as to need no explaining.)