The Pen Mightier Than The Pelisse?

In Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, Anne Elliot seemingly mourns the disparity between women’s and men’s education, and women’s lack of representation in history and the arts: ‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands’.

But in an age when society believed that a girl’s ultimate ambition should be a wife and mother, an increasing number of women (like Austen herself) took up their pens in the hope of earning some money of their own. In a letter to her brother Frank Austen in 1813, she told him of the success of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility: ‘I have now therefore written myself into £250 –which only makes me long for more' (worth approximately £16,000 in today's money).

Over the next few blog posts, I’ll be taking a look at some of Austen’s predecessors and contemporaries who created a fresh role for themselves in society as authors. However, to avoid society's censure, like Austen, they often wrote under a cloak of anonymity. 

Frontispiece of a French edition of Persuasion, Jane Austen's 'La Famille Elliot' (1821) courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 

Morning Visits

Darcy and Georgiana visit Lizzy.

Morning visits were a very important part of a Regency lady or Austen heroine's day. After breakfast ladies went shopping or made ‘morning’ visits until dinner, which could be late in the afternoon.If the family you were visiting were out (or ‘denied’ by the servant), you left a visiting card. In Sense & Sensibility, when Elinor and Marianne stayed in town with Mrs Jennings, they knew that Edward Ferrars had arrived in London because: ‘Twice was his card found on the table, when they returned from their morning engagements’. Morning visitors were received in the drawing room and offered refreshments. In Pride & Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet and her aunt paid a morning call to Miss Darcy at Pemberley, they were treated to ‘cold meat, cake, and a variety of all the finest fruits in season’.

Ladies wore ‘half-dress’ or ‘morning’ dress for paying morning visits and going shopping. Morning or ‘walking’ dresses (circa 1800) usually had long sleeves. Men like Beau Brummell usually wore a beautifully-cut blue morning coat with brass buttons, a light-coloured waistcoat, buckskins, a crisply starched cravat, and top-boots. Ackermann’s Repository for April 1809 reported that ‘dark blue, olive, and bottle green’ coats with ‘silver and gilt basket buttons’ were fashionable for dress and morning coats. On the morning of her marriage to George Wickham, flighty Lydia Bennet (Pride & Prejudice) ‘longed to know whether he would be married in his blue coat’.

Illustrations:

Mr Darcy and his sister Georgiana pay a morning visit to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. C.E.Brock illustration courtesy of the wonderful Molland’s website.

Morning dress, Lady’s Monthly Museum fashion plate, December 1798. Author’s collection.

Full dress and walking dress, Lady’s Monthly Museum fashion plate, January 1805. Author’s collection.

Happy Birthday Jane Austen!

Jane Austen was born on a snowy winter’s night at Steventon Rectory at Hampshire, on 16 December 1775. She was the daughter of clergyman George Austen and Cassandra Leigh, who had eight children: James, George, Edward, Henry, Francis (Frank), Cassandra, Jane and Charles.

The rectory at Steventon had a front door which opened into a small parlour, where Mrs Austen sat busily making and mending clothes. A dining or common sitting-room was at the front of the house, and George Austen had a study overlooking the garden. 

Steventon Parsonage.

Jane was very happy living at Steventon. She had the run of her father’s extensive library (over 500 volumes), and her family encouraged her to write - Austen’s juvenilia and early satirical works are full of fun. Early versions of her novels Sense & Sensibility (Elinor and Marianne), Pride and Prejudice (First Impressions), and Northanger Abbey (Susan) were all written at Steventon. 

Jane shared a bedroom with her sister Cassandra upstairs, where there was another small sitting-room or ‘dressing-room’ which, Jane’s niece Anna Lefroy recalled, ‘opened into a smaller chamber in which my two aunts slept. I remember the common-looking carpet with its chocolate ground, and painted press with shelves above for books, and Jane’s piano, and an oval looking-glass that hung between the windows; but the charm of the room with its scanty furniture and cheaply painted walls must have been... the flow of native wit, with all the fun and nonsense of a large and clever family’ (W. & R.A. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, Smith, Elder & Co., 1913). 

A Visit to Whitchurch

Whitchurch Town Hall

Jane Austen's birthplace of Steventon was a small village, so she often went shopping for necessities in nearby towns and villages like Alton, Basingstoke and Whitchurch. In a letter to Cassandra (November 1800) she wrote: 'Martha [Lloyd] has promised to return with me [after Jane's visit to her], and our plan is to have a nice black frost for walking to Whitchurch and there throw ourselves into a postchaise, one upon the other, our heads hanging out at one door, and our feet at the opposite'. 
If you explore Whitchurch today, you can still see

White Hart, Whitchurch

some of the buildings which would have been familiar to Jane, such as the Town Hall, built in the late 18th century, and the White Hart Hotel, which reputedly dates back to the mid-15th century.  

The fashion magazines of Austen's day like La Belle Assemblee and the Lady's Monthly Museum often mention silk gowns and cloaks.  

Whitchurch Silk Mill

Whitchurch Silk Mill was built after Jane Austen moved away from Steventon in early 1801. It was probably constructed about 1813, although it's possible that there was an earlier mill building on the same site. There was also a silk mill at nearby Overton, another place mentioned in Austen's letters.

Whitchurch Silk Mill is still a working factory, and it has produced silk for film adaptations of Austen's novels including Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. 

Brightly coloured silks wound on swifts at Whitchurch Silk Mill.

Photos © Sue Wilkes.

'All Great Novel-Readers'

In Jane Austen's day, new books were expensive - a three volume set of Sense & Sensibility cost 15s when first published in 1811. Her father George had a large library of his own (500+ volumes) at Steventon Rectory but it was sold when he retired to Bath.

So families hungry to read the latest 'horrid' novels, travel guides and biographies joined a circulating library.  

However, many well-meaning people thought that novels were trashy and immoral tendency.  On 18 December 1798, Jane Austen wrote to Cassandra from Steventon: ‘I have received a very civil note from Mrs Martin, requesting my name as a subscriber to her library... My mother finds the money... Mrs Martin tells me that her collection is not to consist only of novels, but of every kind of literature, etc. She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great novel-readers, and not ashamed of being so; but it was necessary, I suppose, to the self-consequence of half her subscribers ’.

In Pride & Prejudice, Mr Collins was horrified when Mr Bennet asked him to read aloud to the ladies: ‘On beholding it (for everything announced it to be from a circulating library), he started back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels’. Instead Mr Collins chose Fordyce’s Sermons to entertain the girls.

Images:

Portico Library, Mosley St, Manchester. This beautiful building was built by Thomas Harrison. It opened to subscribers in 1806. © Sue Wilkes.

A Halifax Circulating Library ticket, c.1790-1800. Author's collection.

Hugh Thomson illustration of Mr Collins for Pride & Prejudice.

Austen's Novels Revamped

News just in!
Following the recent report that Austen's Emma will be re-worked by Alexander McCall Smith, the BBC News website has just reported that all of Jane Austen's published novels will be rewritten by six modern authors and translated into a modern-day setting. Joanna Trollope's version of Sense and Sensibility will be launched imminently.

I'm not sure I approve - how do you rewrite a classic? I think Austen's novels have stood the test of time - they are still immensely popular in their own right.

Many authors, including the lovely Jane Odiwe, have created fresh novels and sequels from Austen's original novels and characters, and I personally welcome anything which popularizes Austen and her works.

But will readers think that the Austen Project is a step too far? Should Austen's novels be - do they need to be - updated for modern readers? I'd love to know what do you think?


Update 24 October: You can read views by two experts, Professor Kathryn Sutherland from the University of Oxford, and Professor Emma Clery from the University of Southampton, on the Austen rewrites here.


Image: 'Will you do me the honour of reading that letter?' Mr Darcy gives Elizabeth Bennet a letter in the park.  Illustration by C.E. Brock for Pride and Prejudice (Cassell’s Book of Knowledge Vol. VIII, (Waverley Book Co., c.1920)).