• Review: “The Great Gatsby”
  • Review: “Mud”
  • Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines”
  • Review: “Ginger & Rosa”
  • Review: “Stoker”
  • Review: “Side Effects”
  • Review: “Mama”
  • Review: “Zero Dark Thirty”
  • Review: “Gangster Squad”
  • Review: “Les Misérables”
  • Review: “This Is 40”
  • Review: “Any Day Now”
  • Review: “Anna Karenina”
  • Review: “Silver Linings Playbook”
  • Review: “Hitchcock”
  • Review: “Lincoln”
  • Review: “Life of Pi”
  • Review: “Flight”
  • Review: “Skyfall”
  • Review: “Argo”
  • Review: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
  • Review: “Looper”
  • Reviews: “Arbitrage” and “The Master”
  • Review: “The Words”
  • Review: “Celeste and Jesse Forever”
  • Review: “Lawless”
  • Review: “The Campaign”
  • Review: “Total Recall”
  • Review: “To Rome with Love”
  • Review: “The Dark Knight Rises”
  • Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”
  • Review: “Magic Mike”
  • Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man”
  • Review: “Brave”
  • Review: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”
  • Review: “Prometheus”
  • Review: “Snow White and the Huntsman”
  • Review: “Bernie”
  • Review: “The Dictator”
  • Review: “The Raven”
  • Reviews: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”
  • Review: “Chimpanzee”
  • Review: “The Cabin in the Woods”
  • Review: “American Reunion”
  • Review: “Detachment”
  • Review: “The Hunger Games”
  • Review: “Casablanca” (In Re-Release; 1 Night Only)
  • Review: “Silent House”
  • Review: “Wanderlust”
  • Review: “This Means War”
  • Review: “Safe House”
  • Review: “The Woman In Black”
  • Review: “The Grey”
  • Review: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”
  • Review: “Contraband”
  • Review: “Shame” and “Young Adult”
  • Review: “War Horse”
  • Review: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
  • Review: “Like Crazy”
  • Review: “Hugo”
  • Review: “The Descendants”
  • Review: “My Week with Marilyn”
  • Review: “J. Edgar”
  • Review: “In Time”
  • Review: “Take Shelter”
  • Review: “The Thing”
  • Review: “The Ides of March”
  • Review: “Dream House”
  • Review: “50/50”
  • Review: “Moneyball”
  • Review: “Abduction”
  • Review: “Drive”
  • Review: “Contagion”
  • Review: “The Debt”
  • Review: “Our Idiot Brother”
  • Review: “The Help”
  • Review: “Fright Night”
  • Review: “Beginners”
  • Review: “Crazy Stupid Love”
  • Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: pride and prejudice

5 Objects of Vivid Interest

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Posted by colincarman in Jane Austen

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bob dylan, donkeys, elton john, england, english literature, guinea pig, hampshire, Jane Austen, mansfield park, pride and prejudice, ralph fiennes, samuel richardson, william blake

“Won’t You Come See Me, Queen Jane?” – Bob Dylan, “Queen Jane Approximately” (1965)

Chawton Village, encompassing the grand Elizabethan manor (now a library of 15,000 volumes) and the Jane Austen House, is a real l’embarras des richesses; that’s French – real fancy, right? – for an overabundance of something, like a treasure-trove or a costume rack in Sir Elton John’s house. Today I learned that “Chawton” is probably derived from the chalk deposits on which the landscape sits.

I selected just five of these objects for this post as I am in week three of my one-month research trip in Austenland. And I spared you the dying rat I saw on my morning walk even though – rodent-warning – there are guinea pigs in this post and none were hurt in the production.

1. What do you call a donkey with a doctorate degree? Answer: a smart ass. I didn’t warn you against dad jokes: my speciality!Collage_Fotor 4.jpg

And c’est moi, derived from a long line of genuine smart asses. (Yes, they put a bonnet on me but I have a huge cranium. Who wore it better? Kate Winslet or me?) Speaking of asses: below is the donkey carriage that the Austen sisters used to Uber back-and-forth after a hard night of drinking mead in Alton.

Actually, they took the carriage to the country market town of Alton to send and receive mail, and, from The Swan, take a carriage to London to visit more family members. Fun fact: Britons in the age of Austen would sometimes send a gold guinea by post but conceal it under the wax seal. This lead to unarmed postal boys being robbed and the English government’s urging citizens to avoid the practice. You’ve got Mugged!

Fanny Price (the heroine of Mansfield Park) grows very attached to “old grey poney,” and so much so that it’s her “valued friend.” That’s key since, in the nineteenth-century, a horse was a “coach horse” or a “riding horse” but never regarded as a “friend.” My sister had a horse named Carouf and, for all her riding awards, a bedroom with dozens of ribbons pinned to the walls. Austen would call her a “horsewoman” but that doesn’t sound very flattering. My parents were very devoted and allowed us to pursue any and every passion, excluding offshore sports betting and hard drugs.

You’ll recall that when her big brother Edward was made heir to the Knight family, Jane Austen, her sister Cassandra, her mother and friend Martha Lloyd were able to make a former inn into their new home (now the Jane Austen House Museum). From there, she would publish her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, a work so successful that the Prince Regent’s daughter Charlotte told her father excitedly about it. Unless a woman needed to publish to save herself financially, it was a blight upon her character to publish under name, thus “By A Lady.”

2. Below is an image you see quite a bit in Austenland: The Reverend George Austen presenting his son to the Knights (1783). Lucky duck though an unlucky rat. Women’s hair was coming down a bit by the 1780s though it was the fashion to wear your hair vertically and some three times the size of your head. That didn’t include the beehive and by that, I mean an actual working beehive!

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3. Notice Edward’s silk frock coat and breeches, probably worn during his Grand Tour through France and Switzerland in 1786. Some big-assed buttons! Sister Jane Austen never appeared too bitter about all of her brother’s adventures (available, of course, to men only) though all of her novels feature some kind of inequity or discrepancy when it comes to where men and women are placed, and in the latter’s case, displaced. Think of the homeless sisters and mother in Sense and Sensibility or the difference between the grand Mansfield Park and the parsonage occupied by the cranky scold of a widow, Mrs. Norris.

As ever with Austen, it’s subtle but it’s there. Even this line from her letters could be read in different ways: “I went up to the Great House & dawdled away an hour very comfortably.” One implication is the very family member without whom we would not even be discussing the Austen-Knight family was not all that comfortable, or even able to dawdle away, in her relatively lowly digs down the road. Keep an eye on Austen’s usage of the word, the financially-charged “settled” because it’s a way of underscoring the fact that nineteenth-century women, especially the unmarried ones, never feel really settled. It’s unsettling, really.

4. Above, you’ll also see the wood paneling in the Great Hall beside the fireplace. The metal fireplace dates back to 1588 when the English warded off the Spanish Armada. More interesting than the coats of arms (installed by a later descendent, post-Austen, Montagu Knight) are those scratches, probably inscribed there to ward off witches and other demonic spirits. The Anglican Church does not acknowledge the existence of ghosts but that’s doesn’t mean that, out here in the countryside, people weren’t likely to get a bit spooked around the fire on a winter night. Horseshoes were superstitiously nailed above doorways to ward off spirits, or sometimes the finger nail pairings, hair, and urine of those believed to have been bewitched were put in a stone vat and kept beside the bed. Stocking stuffer ideas, y’all!

5. Below is the jewel in Chawton’s librarial crown: the manuscript of “Sir Charles Grandison, or the Happy Man,” an adaptation of the eponymous novel by one of Austen’s favorite writers, Samuel Richardson. Private theatricals were the vogue at the time – think of the bored and housebound Bertram cousins staging “Lovers’ Vows” in Mansfield Park but tearing it all down once the imperious Lord Betram returns home – and demanded that family members build sets, write scripts, and learn their lines. Take a load off, Fanny.

Today, all of that unfolds on Instagram and if your sister Kristen has what it takes, she might wind up on “Hampshire Idol,” “England’s Got Talent,” or if not, “Love Island.”     I was asked not to sneeze or breathe for at least 48-hours before that text was presented to me yesterday at Chawton House. I resisted the urge, like Ralph Fiennes consulting with a Blake drawing in the horror film “Red Dragon,” to render the curator unconscious and devour the work, like a dog (or a guinea pig) that eats your homework.

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5. Finally, the rodent you’ve been waiting for: the guinea pig in a version of Pride and Prejudice featuring nothing but those little pellet-eaters! Ah, Austen: an author, a way-of-life (the subject of my new book) but also a (cottage) industry!

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The British Are Coming

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Posted by colincarman in Jane Austen

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british history, england, freddy mercury, gay, gay and lesbian history, GLBT, hampshire, history, Jane Austen, lesbian, portsmouth, pride, pride and prejudice, shelley, transgender, winchester, winchester cathedral

“You haven’t mentioned me in the blog yet. Just sayin!” – Marc (my partner of some 19 years)

Made you look! Jane Austen may have overturned the conventional traditions when it came to how an educated English lady should fall in love and tie the knot (slowly, mindfully, cautiously – never head-over-heels) but when it comes to sexuality, she was silent. Virtually no scenes take place inside a woman’s boudoir: keep out!

Write what you know, as every creative-writing instructor tells her students. Thus, it’s unlikely that Austen had any first-hand knowledge when it came to sexual love of any kind. A student once asked, puzzlingly, “So did she die a virgin?” We have no way of knowing, I replied; ask her yourself on Tinder or OK Cupid!

Queer truth be told, there’s something strange about a spinsterish life, like a virgin, touched for the very first time; if asexual people exist at all – I don’t know any, myself, do you? – they are the conscientious objectors of erotic life. Jane may have been a member of that very small and inscrutable circle. Let’s face it: her major endowment existed north of the neck. This doesn’t mean that she was a total prude; Her “History of England” includes a playful reference to King James I, a man of such “amiable disposition which inclines to Friendship” and “keener penetration” than “other people.” As I explain below, this is a subtle allusion to the the king’s “pet,” a man named Robert Carr.

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Austen’s fiction, then, is no help when it comes to how GLBT+ people lived, and largely suffered, prior to the twentieth century and it was never-ending nightmare until recently…and it remains so in most of the under-developed parts of the world. Donald F. Trump has taken aim at trans people because they’re a minority within a minority and he knows how to throw red meat at his bigoted base.

“Buggery” was declared not just criminal but punishable by death in 1533 and while it’s undeniably gotten better, we still have to fight the bigotry embodied by the aforesaid hypocrite (no paragon of moral virtue) and Margaret Thatcher (her Clause 28 of 1988 sought to stamp out any promotion of “homosexuality” as a “pretended family relationship”). Thatcher was better known as the Iron Lady whereas Trump is America’s Bronze(r) Man. I miss the days when you could actually see the tan lines from his tanning-bed goggles! A cruel pseudo-aristocrat turned populist turned autocrat.

There is no real basis for the claim that Jane Austen, the so-called aunty spinster of British literature, was anything but heterosexual though some rumbling about the matter does exist and you can read the great Devoney Looser on the topic here. My first book was on the Shelleys and while Percy and Mary Shelley were somewhat happily married, there is actual evidence that the two enjoyed the intensity of their same-sex friendships whereas, with Austen, there is zero proof of her Sapphism. Consider, for example, that Percy Shelley tried not once but twice to get his wives (first, Harriet and, later, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) to live in a menagé à trois         (a household of three) with his “bosom friend” and “brother of my soul” Thomas Jefferson Hogg. They weren’t having it but perhaps because Hogg was a hog or a bore or an eye-sore but who knows? It’s the literature that outlasts us all (bloggers included, I’m afraid to say).

Yet we do care because Percy Shelley carried his interest in, and support for, same-sex love into his prose and poetical writing. Importantly, he wrote, safely living abroad in Italy (where he couldn’t be thrown in the Tower) only the second essay in English to defend same-sex love on moral grounds, and though penned in 1818 as an exculpatory preface to his translation of Plato’s Symposium (that perfidious text of the sex-mad Greeks!), it wouldn’t see the light of day until the 1930s. His widow Mary Shelley didn’t even quite know what to do with it since it made a case for “romantic friendship” as a perfectly normal and natural way to live and love.

Poor Mary: living with a mad genius, she always had a lot on her plate. Mad, bad, and exhausting to know. Even more exhausting to call him your husband. Good grief! For instance, here are the ways in which Shelley addresses Hogg in his early letters, just after the two were expelled from Oxford: “Enter into my schemes – love me as I love you; be as inseparable as once I fondly hoped you were” (from Nov. 1811). He also jokes that he wants to keep his “bosom friend” as his prisoner and, in an Essay on Friendship (which Hogg published for him, in 1858), he describes the overwhelming love he felt for a pre-adolescent classmate that he used to kiss before bedtime at Sion House. He reported all of this to his mother to which she gave him the silent treatment. “She thought me out of my wits, for returned no answer to my letter.” Whatever you do, don’t tell Mom!

Today, I traveled to the once-capital of England, Winchester to visit the grave of Jane Austen, and 10 College Street where she died in July of 1817. She died with her little head on her older sister Cassandra’s knee. I’m going to report on that mecca for my last post later this month but, for now, I’d like to take a brief break from Austen and report on the richly queer history of Hampshire, her rural home in southern England. Below, it was a local’s drawing of Freddy Mercury that got my wheelies spinning!

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Portsmouth, after all, was a hotbed for men seeking sex with sailors. In the Navy! In 1957, the Wolfenden Report reported that, after London and Birmingham, Portsmouth was third in terms of “unnatural offenses.” William Williams, a man whose parents named him twice, probably horrified his parents when the 38-year-old was charged with an “assault” on Richard Killin. Contrary to legal opinion, these were consenting adults just doing their thing. In the States, the Supreme Court ruling, Bowers versus Hardwick, would finally protect gays and lesbians from doing just that behind closed doors and in private; before that, in 1986, we were never safe from intrusion and incarceration. This may explain the joke vis-a-vis the Royal Navy and Portsmouth in Mansfield Park, which some reject is a pun on the character Mary Crawford’s part. “Of Rears and Vices, I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.”

I was quite impressed that the Hampshire Record Office & Archives, probably in support of June and Pride Month, produced a diorama on the topic and will even sell you a copy called “A Queer A-Z of Hampshire” by Clifford Williams for two quid. Lord Alfred Douglas (the twinky catalyst of Oscar Wilde’s ruination) went to Winchester College between 1884-88. He double-majored in Vanity and Betrayal. The gross indecency belongs soley to Douglas, a true “chancer,” as the British say (or manipulator), and modern-day Judas. If you’re wild about Wilde, you must abhor “Bosie” and his virulent father, The Marquess of Queensberry. An even (red) tie with Don and Don Jr. OK, I’ll stop the political point-scoring because July is my Trump-cleanse.

Here are two sites in Hampshire that may interest you if you wish to travel the yellow brick road of GLBT+ history. Below, you’ll see a marker in Portsmouth for George Villiers, the First Duke of Buckingham. He was King James’s devoted companion and stabbed to death in the Greyhound public house in the old part of the city. In the city’s cathedral, you’ll find a moving memorial to him influenced by his sister, Susanna Countess of Denigh, who subtly acknowledges her brother’s great beauty. His bowels were buried in Portsmouth, beside his sister, but his body buried in Westminster Cathedral. Apparently you can be in two places in once. I don’t mean to make light; another victim of homophobia, King Edward II, died after he had a hot fire-poker stuck up his arse. The intense suffering to which gay people have been subjected is further testament to the angry ambivalence they arouse in their attackers. When victimized, we unleash the animal inside.

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Finally, this is an entry in (the village of) Odiham’s marriage records that show that Charles Hambleton and Mary Seamel were wed in 1748 but only later was Charles proved to be a lady. It may be hard to see but a clerk, belatedly alert, circled the names in red (see the right-hand side and just before “1749”). Odiham was never that easy of a place to live: during the Napoleonic war, British soldiers forced their French prisoners to build the canal, which meant digging out of a chalk landscape. Historians such as John Boswell have shown that same-sex marriage dates back to antiquity.

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This post is dedicated to all of those who lived their lives openly, or secretly,

and died in the red.

And to Marc who is patiently waiting to join me here in the south of England. In terms of Austen’s leading men, he’s closest to Henry Tilney (of Northanger Abbey) because he’s the queerest and chattiest of her six major heroes.

And that’s just fine by me XOXO

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Gone Girls!

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Posted by colincarman in Jane Austen

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chawton, frances burney, hampshire, Jane Austen, mansfield park, pride and prejudice, romanticism, southern england, wollstonecraft

“Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.” – Austen, Mansfield Park

If you’re sticking with me during this one-month research trip in southern England, chances are you like books and this entry is devoted to some pretty fine and rare books. My brother calls physical books – you know, the pre-Kindle ones made from paper and paste and ink – “dust collectors” but he does so only to irritate me, and succeeds every time! Older brothers are especially skilled at such things. Christopher, are you out there? You didn’t even wish me a bon voyage! Ah well, as Austen writes in Mansfield Park, “What strange creatures brothers are!”

Below are some real jewels found only in the Chawton Library. Wait for them: don’t scroll! Here is the statue of the author herself just in front of Saint Nicholas. I purposefully avoided “Authoress” for reasons that will soon become clear. The bonnet is to Jane Austen as the crusty old beard is to Walt Whitman, or the coke nail to William S. Burroughs.

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As I made plain in my original post, my heart really belongs to the radicals of the English Romantic period: Godwin, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Hunt, and the Shelleys. My father would never identify as a hippie – he can’t even whistle a Beatles tune – but he did instill in Meg, Chris, and me a spirited anti-authoritarianism. We weren’t even expected to follow his rules; it was my mum’s job to enforce the rules. (Uh-oh, English colloquialisms creeping in already!) We don’t really know much about Jane Austen’s mum; like most women of the era, she was more pregnant than not and social norms demanded that girls be promptly married. I wonder how much of the marriage-crazed matchmaker existed in Mrs. Cassandra Austen and whether she, in parts, inspired the risible Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. It’s worth noting that when her daughter, Elizabeth, first speaks in the novel, she politely chides her mother for acting the fool. There’s a subtle radicalism in any household where the children know more than their dear ol’ mums and dads. Isn’t Mr. Bennet’s reaction to Elizabeth’s rejection of the man-splaining Mr Collins the best ever? But I digress.

If you are a self-respecting Austenite, you must must must visit and donate generously to Chawton House. You can even sponsor a brick!  What’s wonderful about the librarians and curators at there is that they have created a splendid showcase of women writers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including an original edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (published in 1792). This political manifesto, written hastily in a matter of days, inaugurated the modern feminist movement as we know it, and its central postulate is pretty much a no-brainer (as much as I hate that expression): give girls an education! Reason is the tide that lifts all boats, including husbands who have nothing of substance to talk about with their pretty but empty-headed wives. I use “no-brainer” because, as Wollstonecraft forcefully argues, a brainless woman is also a petty, conniving and coquettish woman. Ridiculed as a “hyena in petticoats” during her day, Wollstonecraft was a true renegade and it’s a tragic irony that she would die in childbirth, leaving this world but leaving behind the motherless child that would go on to pen Frankenstein. (Don’t get me started!) Fun fact: First Lady Melania Trump keeps a copy of A Vindication on her nightstand and longs for her own prison-break. Nah, that’s fake news! The Trumps don’t read! Frederick Douglass is still doing a fantastic job, remember? It’s nice to have a month off from our national nightmare.

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Remember from the last post that the Austen sisters lived down the road in a brick cottage but would walk to the great manor house owned by their richer older brother. Creative types are usually idiotic when it comes to money, so Edward’s very existence must have been a family blessing. He was Lord of the Manor of Alton Eastbrook and had a Grand Tour, as was the custom for English men hoping to get frisky on the Continent. As Madonna liked to advertise, Italians do it better, and by “it,” she meant temper tantrums in satin pajamas from Harrods. Edward Austen/Knight was adopted by the Knight family, which, as a new friend at Chawton reminded me today, is a lot like the adoption of Fanny Price by the Bertrams in Mansfield Park. Movin’ on up! Here’s another allusion: Edward would rent, or let out, Chawton much like the line below in the opening paragraphs of Pride and Prejudice (“Have you heard that Netherfield is let at last?”).

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The peacock is actually on loan from the Oscar Wilde estate. The proud peacock is a bit “overdetermined” – English lit. crit. talk – but it beats a buzzard or a turkey. Another (American) Romantic, Edgar Alan Poe, reportedly, chose the parrot before he finally settled on the raven, which was a smart move. He made that decision after the opium and incest wore off. Imagine the announcer yelling: Please welcome to the field, the Baltimore Parrots! And the crowd went wild.

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Finally, above is the only time that Jane Austen saw her name in print as she published anonymously, as was the custom for authoresses (too many S’s) of the age. Look on the left-hand side and down ten rows. Dating from 1796 – Austen would have been twenty-one – she is listed as a subscriber to Frances Burney’s Camilla: or a Picture of Youth. “Miss J. Austen, Steventon.” Why put your name on something when the book reviewers at Blackwoods would skewer you even worse for being a “woman writer”? Oh yeah, and a woman who earned a living through writing hadn’t yet emerged yet. Some still maintain, erroneously, that Mary Shelley’s poet husband, Percy Bysshe, wrote Frankenstein and, in its day, the gothic classic was damned as the “foulest toad-stool” to ever spring from a dung-heap. Clearly the reviewer hadn’t read the Twilight series.

Overheard, by the way, by noisy Americans in the pub across from the Jane Austen House: “Since I turned fifty, I have to pee every ten minutes. Maybe I need a sleep study.” Then, the wife (returning with a gift bag from the Jane Austen House and Museum): “Is there only beer here? Austen probably only drank cocktails…more feminine!”

Okay, there are a number of things wrong in this exchange: prostates and sleep do not correlate, and while Austen does complain of a hangover in her letters, there were no Cosmos or Palomas in Regency-era England. Immoderation of any kind is a loathsome thing in Austen’s fiction. A major influence over her was Brunton’s Self-Control (1811). It’s not the booze but how it’s used. This is why the “dangerous illness” of Tom Bertram is singled out toward the conclusion of Mansfield Park. His immoderation inevitable catches up with him; hence: “Tom had gone from London with a party of young men to Newmarket, where a neglected fall, and a good deal of drinking, had brought on a fever.” Fever in the evening, fever all through the night…

Somewhere along the line, “Sex and the City” and Jane “RomCom” Austen embedded themselves in the bloodstream of modern female culture.  Yeah, you become a fly on the wall when you’re flying solo in an English village. I’d be even more invisible if I were a lady even though I like to think I’d be a pretty hot chick, bonnet or no bonnet.

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In my next post, we will all head to the gardens at Chawton House, so bring your sunscreen!

 

 

Welcome to Austenland

02 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by colincarman in Jane Austen

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British literature, chawton, colorado mesa university, england, frankenstein, Jane Austen, lord byron, mary shelley, pride and prejudice

Ah, l’aimable Jane!

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This is a blog where, recipe-by-recipe, I re-create the famous French meals popularized by Julia Child, including her Chef Boyardee. Oh wait, that’s been done before! Instead, this is a blog where I leak top-secret government files and document my time spent inside the Ecuadorian embassy while on roller-skates. Rats, it’s all been done before!

No, no, this is a blog where I document a four-week research trip to Austenland in Hampshire, England. Please don’t tell me to “keep calm” — tranquillity is overrated — but I’ll allow this, just this once:Read Austen

If you’re still reading, you haven’t clicked away because you’re (1) a fan of Austen, (2) a close family member of mine, or (3) someone with a browser that froze. If you fall into the third category, and especially if you own a PC, just throw a heating blanket over the monitor and hope for the best.

Welcome to Austen-Leaks or, better yet, Wiki-Darcy. What do you call a cat-lover’s version of an Austen novel? Answer: Purr-suasion.

Whatever you call it, this is a blog that begins on the Butts, the Butts Road in Alton, England, that is. This is the only English-speaking country on the face of the earth — didn’t they invent English, after all, with the help of Beowulf, or was it Virginia Woolf? — that can label a street “Butts Road” without a hint of self-consciousness. Please do not wake up the Butts! They need their rest. The Butts family tree is available upon request. It’s in my back pocket.

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New to the area, I originally thought that a family with the most unfortunate of surnames resides in this house but, alas, the Butts takes you toward Chawton Village where one of the world’s greatest storytellers lived for the last eight years of her life. Her name was Mary Shelley – oh wait, Mary Shelley was the subject of my first book. This blog, and germinating second book, is about Jane Austen (1775-1817). Thanks to the sponsorship of The Jane Austen Society of America, I was awarded the international visitor position for a research trip. That’s the academic version of solitary confinement but the cuisine is better. But this is England, folks, so just barely.

Today the lovely and welcoming people at Chawton even made me a name tag – Colin Carman, Ph.D. J.A.S.N.A. I.V.P. (yeah, you know me) – so it’s official. (The more abbreviations after your name, the more useless you are in everyday life. Once my car broke down, so I sold it to the roadside assistant and just drove off in his; it was a Geo.) There’s even a slight discount on sandwiches and tea in the dining room.

Today, I offered a potato chip to the house dog – Toby (photo-ready below) – who came by the table where I was taking notes, but he didn’t want the chip. Could he be cuter? Having two Labrador Retrievers back in the States, I was shocked to meet a dog that actually refused a table scrap. Our dogs will eat anything that doesn’t eat them first. I also had a clearer head today, on my second day in Hampshire, than I did on my first day: jet-lag, a discount on Cornish ales in the pub just down the road from the room I rented, et cetera. Toby remains unimpressed.

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Before I got a real job at the univ, I maintained this blog and wrote film reviews. I also taught yoga, which means your life is pretty much going nowhere fast. I take that back: you can achieve nirvana but also bankruptcy. You see, watching films and reading literary fiction are my two favorite past times but to really drum-up traffic, on Twitter or in the blogosphere, you have to really (and contentiously) engage with other bloggers and Tweeters and I haven’t the time. This is called “dragging,” as in “Oooh, don’t drag me, bro.” You won’t find me in many comments sections as it’s a rather giant W.O.T. (or, waste of time). That was five or so years ago, before I taught a course on Jane Austen at my home university, Colorado Mesa University, and before I wrote a book about Mary Shelley, her poet-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their engagement with the natural world. Thank you to my alma mater for providing me with unlimited shower caps for life.

Having spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the English Romantics, I thought it might be wise to shift my focus to another Romantic heavyweight, Jane Austen, and sustain my interest in environmentalist philosophy. Austen is generally thought to be a “social” writer and chronicler of nineteenth-century courtship and marriage. She is still unfairly pegged as a “woman writer” with “feminine” interests but we’ll return to that misconception later on. I can’t help myself, so here is a Shelleyan collage from last summer when I visited Mary Shelley’s grave in Bournemouth. Check out the guy who photobombed my pic. He actually growled at me to get out the way. The only requirement at the Shelley gravesite is that you don’t rob it, and that’s not a lot to ask! Oh and don’t plug the corpse into any available outlet.

MS GraveFor now, here are four important facts about Jane Austen, her life and works.

#1. Jane Austen was the seventh of eight children and her only sister Cassandra’s junior by two years. They had five brothers, which meant sizable Tesco bills for their father, the Reverend George Austen and his wife Cassandra. Three sons in three years: good grief! Here is Mrs. Austen’s grave in the churchyard just below the manor house owned by the Austen sisters’ older (and considerably richer) brother Edward. Every good writer needs a benefactor, after all! The third eldest of the Austen boys, Edward was adopted by the very wealthy cousins of his father, the Knight family, which meant that his financial situation went from black to white, or day to Knight, in the blink of an eye. I have a pretty wealthy uncle myself — he invented the surgical glove two centuries ago — but he hasn’t yet put me on the payroll. Uncle Nathan, stop acting like you have a new phone and responding: “Who dis? New phone.” You can only use that excuse twice.

Saint Nicholas

The year 1808 was a bad year for Edward’s wife, who died, but a good year for the unmarried Austen sisters who wasted no time in moving from Southampton to Chawton. The former place is the port city where a little-known vessel called the Titanic embarked on its fatally frosty voyage. The Titanic, as you know, did not live up to its illustrious name but that’s the just the tip of the iceberg. Two years prior to the death of Edward’s wife, the Austens gathered in Chawton and by 1809, they made this tiny village in the west country their home.

The two Cassandras, Jane’s sister and mother, are interred adjacent to the sanctuary of Saint Nicholas, which you can see jutting out from the trees below. This is a stone-built chapel dating from the thirteenth century. Jane’s father officiated for thirty years at Saint Nick’s, which is 870 fewer years than the yew tree has stood outside and, at one time, held the keys to the front door inside. Remember to lock the doors tightly, so the swallows don’t conduct their own service. But don’t be such a cassandra about it! Not the end-of-the-world. Why are mother and daughter buried side-by-side? I’ll look into that. What do you call a cremated Romantic? (I don’t have a punchline for that one, so feel free to contribute in the comments.) Are you asleep already? For the textual equivalent of Melatonin, here is my book on the Shelleys.

Mother Sister Graves

#2. A tad more biography: before Christmas in 1775, Jane was born to her clergyman father during a bitterly cold stretch of winter, so cold, in fact, that lambs froze in the fields. Lamb shoulder is a thing in the UK, btw. Do they have shoulders, really? Were lamb shoulder pads a thing in the 1980s? Reverend Austen, who had forfeited his scholarship at Oxford University, because he wished to start a family with Cassandra, walked in the snow to lay holly at Saint Nicholas and to serve the sacrament. This was soon after his second and youngest daughter was born at home, without the aid of a physician (common for the time period), and christened at Steventon Rectory. Jane Austen’s birthplace has been since torn down. I was born and raised in New Jersey, which means that my baptismal font served a dual function as a punch bowl at Dunkin’ Donuts.

#3. Jane Austen isn’t simply a proper English writer but, by now, an industry unto herself. In fact, her novels could easily rival that single work of her contemporary, Mary Shelley, in terms of screen time. There are more than one hundred Frankenstein-inspired films – “Frankenweenie” anyone? – and nearly that many loosely based on Austen’s fiction. There’s even Pride and Prejudice with Zombies, a book that can be judged by its cover since the title is the most memorable part. I’m currently re-writing a work of J.D. Salinger’s, tentatively called The Catcher in the Rye with Zombies, so Brian Grazer or other Hollywood producers, if you’re out there, just shoot me an email and it’s yours. It’s too bad she predates movie royalties. She and Cassandra would travel by donkey — no joke — to Alton to get groceries; had she lived to see her novels’ success on screen, the sisters would have traveled by Tesla and thrown their candy wrappers out the window.

#4. Jane Austen only saw real success during the last seven years of her short but productive life; she likely died of Addison’s Disease but the cause of death remains a debate in medical history. Adrenal failure is certainly no fun; what is fun is this little tidbit: when Austen completed a draft of what would become her most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, she was just twenty years old (only one year older than Mary Shelley when she composed Frankenstein) though she would not see the novel in print for another thirty seven years! And you thought your pointless doctoral dissertation on apiarian promiscuity in the works of Margaret Atwood was taking forever! This means that Austen was same age as her classic heroine, the strong-willed Elizabeth Bennet, when she wrote it and nearly as old as Eliza’s mother when it finally reached the reading public in 1813. From there, she lived like a Romantic-era rock star: sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. Actually, no, that was Lord Byron’s job and the unmarried Austen lived out her days without children, or, as I like to say, “child-free.” In fact, she regarded her novels as her children and, having gotten a taste of success, remarked that the success of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility “only makes me long for more.” Get it, girl!

Speaking of longing, I need some much-needed sleep and that Cornish ale I mentioned before, so, for now, c’est moi inside the private reading room in the Chawton Library. I’m sensitive about my big shiny forehead because I keep my brains in there. Thus, there is no comments section. This place has really gone to the dogs if they (Toby, included) let the likes of me in! I kid, of course, as this blog is at times irreverent. It’s the Shelleyist in me to not respect authority. And it’s the Janeite in you that, I hope, will keep you reading about this research trip. Toby will also be contributing.

Thanks again to the lovely people at Chawton House! They seem so happy, and as my uncle Jim put it, why wouldn’t they be!? As we stupidly reply to obvious statements, in the States, “Right?!?”

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Onward! PS: What does Morrissey think of Jane Austen? His far-right stances as of late have me worried for his mental health and, worse yet, I bought tickets to see him in Utah in September. But back to Jane…

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