• 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: romanticism

What Killed Jane Austen?

Featured

Posted by colincarman in Jane Austen

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

addison's disease, alton england, benjamin franklin, chawton, franz kafka, gilbert white, hampshire, Jane Austen, john keats, rolls-royce, romanticism, sanditon, tuberculosis, winchester cathedral

“But the Providence of God has restored me – & may I be more fit to appear before him when I am summoned, than I shd have been now! Sick or Well, believe me ever yr attached friend.”

– Jane Austen, during her final illness, writing to Anne Sharp (22 May 1817)

Austen was a literary lion who took pride in her creative works. She also knew, by the spring of 1817, that her death was imminent. Unmarried, she had lived fairly well in the cottage owned by her older brother, without whom she and her sister would have been forced to work as governesses, or worse, attendants to rich ladies at death’s door. Similarly, Austen’s widowed mother received no pension after her father’s death. As I stated in a previous post, without her novels, the greatest fiction-writer of the nineteenth century in England would have died dead-broke at the age of 41. In one of her final epistles above, Austen was still writing from the village of Chawton, later described by her nephew and the family biographer, James Edward-Austen Leigh in the following: “Chawton may be called the second, as well as the last home of Jane Austen…here she found a real home amongst her own people…Chawton must also be considered the place most closely connected with her career as a writer [though] she began to droop and wither away still in the prime of her life.”

Collage_Fotor 4.jpg

Speaking of the prime of one’s life, I went to the Gilbert White House Museum in Selborne, Hampshire over the weekend and, as you can see, I was swept up into a dance troupe. On the following day, I went to the car and bus rally in Alton, and I took a few pictures for my brother, Chris, who is a gear-head. “I drive my mini-Cooper and I’m feeling super duper,” rapped Madonna back in 2003. Check out the martini tray in the back of the 1961 Rolls-Roys Silver Cloud II. It’s amazing to think my grandparents would swill martinis and drive their kids home without seat belts or even head-rests. Not so safe or super-duper!

Collage_Fotor 87

Austen made her will on the 27thof April and within a month, she bid her mother farewell for the final time and, with her beloved sister, set out for Winchester (once the capital of England) and lodged at 8 College Street. The novel Sanditon – soon to be a BBC miniseries – was left unfinished. You can see the yellow house below, close to the college, and the plague outside this now privately owned home. It’s eerie and fortuitous to write this final post on the day in which Austen was laid to rest inside Winchester Cathedral, one of the largest cathedrals in the world (constructed in 1079, consecrated 14 years later. “Winchester Cathedral, you’re bringing me down.” You can Spotify the Frank Sinatra version of that classic by the New Vaudeville Band in 1966. Not far from the famous cathedral, Benjamin Franklin composed some of his Autobiography and, in earlier times, the sardonic versifier Alexander Pope was expelled from school. That’s the west door to the cathedral in the top left below.

Collage_Fotor

The sad fact is that her beloved sister Cassandra not only censored her letters but, according to their niece Caroline Austen, burned many of her correspondences. The reason being, as Austen scholar Deirdre Le Faye speculates, that either the author described the physical symptoms of her various illness a bit too graphically, or spoken ill of family members. (We can definitively rule of the possibility of any naked selfies of cheeky text messages.) Of course, we all wish someone had denied Cassandra the matches she needed. In the following century, Franz Kafka asked a friend to do the same and, thankfully, the friend ignored the request. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (considered the most autumnal of her six romances, and composed during her mysterious illness) were published posthumously. After a traditional English breakfast like the one served on the High Street, I was just about ready to crawl into the Austen crypt with her. Shove over, sister! 

Collage_Fotor 6.jpg

I met with a local historian, Jane Hurst, yesterday at the Curtis Museum in Alton and she added that male members of the family also cleared out the sister’s belongings, adding “And we all know how men clear out things!” Hurst added that the various theories as to what Austen actually died of “helps to sell books,” and she gleefully dismissed the idea that the wallpaper in the cottage was full of arsenic. “She would have had to lick the walls! What rubbish!”

The other theory is that Austen contracted bovine tuberculosis; consumption was a major killer in the Regency period. Just ask John Keats who nursed his brothers, contracted the disease from them, and knew his days were numbered when he coughed up blood. A villager in Chawton, John White, recalls Cassandra’s dog, Link, going to the great house for milk and the dog carrying it back around its neck. Is this the missing link? Austen complained of skin discoloration, headaches but, again, Cassandra may have hurt rather than helped matters if she excised the details of the mysterious illness from Austen’s letters. The reigning theory is still that Austen died of Addison’s disease, which is an adrenal insufficiency. The name of the disease, which occurs when the body doesn’t produce enough hormones, would not be coined until 1848 (by Thomas Addison), and John F. Kennedy was a famous sufferer. What a sad coincidence that Lou Gerrigh died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, right?

Speaking of sisters, here is what Cassandra wrote to their niece, Fanny Knight, from Winchester, just after Jane Austen’s death: “I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed, – She was the sun of my life, the gilder of my pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself.” But let’s give Austen the final word. According to that same letter, her sister recalls of their last days in Winchester:

“When I asked her if there was anything she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death & some of her words were ‘God grand me patience, Pray for me Oh Pray for me.’”

And, for perhaps once in her short and prodigious life, the great wit spoke without a drop of irony or animadversion. For once, the great Jane Austen was dead serious about something.

Ave Atque Vale, Queen Jane (1775-1817)

AustenbyCassandra

51.128017 -0.988436

Gone Girls!

Featured

Posted by colincarman in Jane Austen

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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.

IMG_0004

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.

IMG_0029

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?”).

IMG_0037.jpeg

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.

IMG_0040.jpeg

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.

IMG_0026.jpeg

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

 

 

Recent Posts

  • Sign Posts!
  • What Killed Jane Austen?
  • Was Austen a Holy Roller?
  • 5 Objects of Vivid Interest
  • Austen’s Powers

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 259 other subscribers

Top Posts & Pages

  • Sign Posts!
  • What Killed Jane Austen?
  • Was Austen a Holy Roller?
  • 5 Objects of Vivid Interest
  • Austen's Powers
  • The British Are Coming
  • It Takes A Village...or Two...or Ten
  • Green Jane
  • Gone Girls!
  • Welcome to Austenland

Jane Austen

action alien alpha dog amanda seyfried animals anton yelchin austin powers blue valentine bradley cooper brad pitt bromance carey mulligan charlize theron chawton christina hendricks christopher plummer colin farrell comedy crazy stupid love daniel craig dickens dracula drama emma stone england ewan mcgregor family frankenstein freud gay george clooney hampshire hbo horror jack russell terrier Jane Austen jessica chastain john lithgow joseph gordon levitt jude law kurt cobain mad men madonna mansfield park mary shelley matthew mcconaughey michael fassbender naomi watts oscars paris paul rudd philip seymour hoffman poetry politics portsmouth pride and prejudice romantic romantic comedy ryan gosling science fiction september 11 sex shakespeare shelley steven soderbergh summer blockbuster the hangover the help the social network thriller tim burton true blood twilight vampires viola davis

Blog Stats

  • 52,860 hits
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Colin Carman Twitter

Tweets by ColinCarman

Colin Carman

Colin Carman

Archives

  • July 2019
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011

Blogroll

  • Cinema Train
  • Dan the Man's Movie Reviews
  • Fogs' Movie Reviews

Category Cloud

Film Reviews Jane Austen Poems and Plogs (Poem-Blogs) Uncategorized

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Colin Carman
    • Join 174 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Colin Carman
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...