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Thinking in Time: Jane Austen's Last Work and Family Legacy

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Thinking in Time: Jane Austen's Last Work and Family Legacy Thinking in Time: Jane Austen’s Last Work anditon (1817) begins with an in- terruption. Mr. and Mrs. Park- and Family Legacy er are on their way to Willing- den in search of a surgeon and, “being inducedS by [this] business to quit the high road, and attempt a very rough lane, LISE GASTON [are] overturned in toiling up its long ascent half rock, half sand.”1 The novel fragment’s first paragraph introduces the characters’ progress only to halt it: Mr. [T]he late works of significant artists . are, for the most Parker, the impulsive speculator in the part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of new seaside town of Sanditon, longs to sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender them- be “everywhere out of his house at once,” selves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony but a sprained ankle forces him to “sit that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demand- down on the bank, unable to stand” (pp. ing from works of art, and they show more traces of his- 173, 155 [chaps. 4, 1]). Help arrives from tory than of growth. – Theodor Adorno, “Late Style in the nearby proprietors, the Heywoods, Beethoven” (1937) whose movements are “limited to one But seven years I suppose are enough to change every small circle” and made “in the old coach pore of one’s skin, & every feeling of one’s mind. – Jane which had been new when they were Austen to Cassandra Austen, 8 April 1805 married and fresh lined on their eldest son’s coming of age ten years ago” (pp. 163–64 [chap. 2]). The adjectives new and fresh linger ironically in the description of the decades-old coach, its solidity at odds with the Parkers’ presumably newer, swifter vehicle, now damaged and inert. In this scene, the meeting of acceleration and stasis – innovation and continuity – illustrates disparate, even competing ex- periences of time, resulting in a collision that upsets the narrative momentum. This energetic yet arrested beginning Nineteenth Century Studies 31 (2019): 1–14. © 2019 Nineteenth Century Studies Association. All rights reserved, 0893-7931/2011. Nineteenth Century Studies 1 is fitting for a text that Jane Austen (1775– by leveraging the details of Austen’s do- 1817) would not live to complete. Her mestic life, her written work, and even immediate descendants and first biog- the body of “dear ‘Aunt Jane’” (p. 141 [chap. raphers referred to Sanditon as the “Last 9]) to depict a discrete social and histori- Work,” a classification that reflects their cal era detached from their own: one at own desire to memorialize. It would not odds, as we shall see, with Sanditon’s por- appear in print until over fifty years af- trayal of an unsettled temporal continu- ter her death, and, by that time, her fam- ity. Critics such as Ted Underwood have ily members had constructed a personal argued that such a “periodized, contras- history for the once-anonymous writer. tive model of history . emerged toward Henry Austen’s (1771–1850) “Biographi- the end of the eighteenth century,” and cal Notice of the Author,” appended to many recent works have aimed to articu- the posthumous editions of Northanger late the ways in which art and literature Abbey and Persuasion in 1818, first public- have both informed and responded to ly named his sister as the author of her what Jonathan Sachs characterizes as a works.2 Sixteen years later, Henry revised “generalized set of temporal instabili- his initial remarks in a “Memoir of Miss ties generated by the rush of commercial Austen” for Bentley’s Standard Novels, to society and by the compensatory strate- whom he had sold the copyright. He re- gies that develop in relationship to that mained the primary biographical source sense of hurry and accelerated time.”6 until 1869, when James Edward Austen- If the eighteenth century did develop a Leigh (1798–1874) published A Memoir “new epochal consciousness” born from of Jane Austen.3 Austen-Leigh, the son of industrial and commercial acceleration Austen’s eldest brother, James (1765–1819), and the proliferation of print culture, it informs his readers that he produced the was also a consciousness “in which one’s Memoir in response to growing interest own time was not only experienced si- in his aunt and “from a conviction that, multaneously as an end and a beginning however little [he] may have to tell, no but also as a period of transition.”7 Emily one else is left who could tell so much Rohrbach, for example, argues for a Ro- of her.”4 (The last of Austen’s siblings had mantic-era “‘present’ that is on the move, died in 1865, and Austen-Leigh himself continually on the verge of change, and, was in his early seventies.) Surviving let- to a certain extent, elusive: a present ters between Austen-Leigh and his col- that remains open to, or inhabited by, laborators – Anna Lefroy (1793–1872) and the potential unexpectedness of an ap- Caroline Austen (1805–80), his sisters – proaching futurity.”8 In this essay, I argue reveal that they also wanted to suppress that Sanditon, the work left unfinished at potential competing narratives of Aunt Austen’s death in 1817, depicts this mod- Jane coming from other branches of the ern temporal continuum, in which an Austen family. This challenge would first unsettled present contains both the past become public in 1884 when Lord Br- and a speculative future: Sanditon’s set- abourne (1829–93), the grandson of Aus- ting, narrative style, and speculations re- ten’s brother Edward Knight (1768–1852), veal how Austen’s work both anticipates published Letters of Jane Austen. Brabourne and preemptively resists her biographers’ advertises his volume as “the confidential attempts at textual, historical, and even outpourings of Jane Austen’s soul,”5 a di- bodily containment. In contrast, Austen- rect contrast to Austen-Leigh’s careful Leigh and his collaborators are not in- framing of his few shared letters: “Some terested in historical transition; instead, entire letters, and many extracts, will they deploy the objects and customs of be given in this memoir; but the reader Romantic life to mark historical division must be warned not to expect too much in an attempt to control an elusive tem- from them” (p. 57 [chap. 3]). porality and prevent the works and fig- Austen-Leigh and his sisters create ure of Aunt Jane from becoming overly and maintain this biographical reticence public and open to speculation. To do so, they align the unpublished texts and historical facts of Austen’s life with a bio- Thinking in Time logically specific body that is finite, bar- 2 ren, and unrecoverable. ters of the house were gradually giving While critics have long discerned the proper air of confusion by a grand ironies in familial claims suggesting that piano forte and a harp, flower-stands and Austen “never uttered either a hasty, a little tables placed in every direction.”12 silly, or a severe expression,” the juxta- Less concerned with offering informa- position of the Memoir with her fiction tion than with cataloging dissimilarities, also illustrates a dialectical opposition Austen-Leigh highlights historical cus- between compartmentalized and con- toms that “ought to be recorded” only tinuous experiences of historical time.9 because they have “long ceased to exist” This dichotomy between “two specifi- (p. 39). Comparative descriptions distin- cally temporal determinations” occurs guish between then and now: “But perhaps through textual content, prose styles, we should be most struck with the total and biological figurations: while Austen’s absence of those elegant little articles characters inhabit states of persistent which now embellish and encumber speculation, Austen-Leigh relegates his our drawing-room tables” (p. 31). Simi- subject to a nongenerative past, trying to larly, he writes: “Many things connected fix her firmly in a reconstructed history with the ball-rooms of those days have to which he and his family can lay pro- now passed into oblivion” (p. 32). He re- prietary claim.10 The tension in a pairing peatedly values “things which have been that, to echo Edward Said, “implies two long ago swept away” (p. 77 [chap. 4]) only different perspectives, two historiog- because he marks their extinction: he is, raphies, one linear and subsuming, the to borrow Underwood’s phrase, a histo- other contrapuntal,” comes to a material rian “dramatizing the vertiginous gulfs crux when we read Austen’s work against between eras, and then claiming vertigo its posthumous biographical frame:11 ex- itself as a source of meaning.”13 The details cerpts from Sanditon first appear in print are largely unimportant. Jane Austen in the second edition of Austen-Leigh’s herself attacks this kind of temporal ver- Memoir. This combination within the tigo in Persuasion, mocking those who in- same volume shows how, while transi- sist on assigning shock value to the nor- tion and division may be oppositional, mal progression of change: “Oh! could they necessarily coexist as outcomes the originals of the portraits against the of accelerated historical conscious- wainscot, could the gentlemen in brown ness. And the Memoir further illustrates velvet and the ladies in blue satin have how representations of women’s bodies, seen what was going on, have been con- whether incapable of or available for sex- scious of such an overthrow of all order ual reproduction, can inhabit the locus and neatness! The portraits themselves of that temporal opposition, functioning seemed to be staring in astonishment.”14 as markers of division or continuity – In the Memoir, Austen-Leigh acts as a lat- Austen’s own body not excepted.
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