JANE AUSTEN NORA BARTLETT EDITED BY JANE STABLER B Reflections of a Reader ARTLETT NORA BARTLETT EDITED BY JANE STABLER All lovers of Jane Austen, the most knowledgeable as well as those who have just discovered her, will have much to learn from these modest, searching, and wonderfully perceptive essays. Prof. Richard Cronin, University of Glasgow This volume presents an exhilarating and insightful collection of essays on Jane JANE AUSTEN Austen – distilling the author’s deep understanding and appreciation of Austen’s works across a lifetime. The volume is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptive analysis of individual scenes to the exploration of motifs across Austen’s fiction. Full of astute connections, these lively discussions hinge on the study of human behaviour – from family relationships to sickness and hypochondria – highlighting Austen’s artful literary techniques and her powers of human observation. Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader by (the late) Nora Bartlett is a brilliant contribution to the field of Jane Austen studies, both in its accessible style (which preserves the oral register of the original lectures), and in its foregrounding of the reader in a warm, compelling and incisive conversation about Austen’s works. As such, it will appeal widely to all lovers of Jane Austen, whether first-time readers, students or scholars. As with all Open Book publications, this entire book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital editions, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover image: Woman Reading, Portrait of Sofia Kramskaya by Ivan Kramskoi (1837–1887). Cover design: Anna Gatti. book eebook and OA editions also available JANE AUSTEN Reflections of a Reader OBP https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2021 Nora Bartlett. Jane Stabler (editor) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Nora Bartlett. Edited by Jane Stabler, Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0216 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0216#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0216#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 9781783749751 ISBN Hardback: 9781783749768 ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783749775 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783749782 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783749799 ISBN XML: 9781783749805 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0216 Cover image: Ivan Kramskoy, Woman Reading. Portrait of Sofia Kramskaya (after 1866), Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Kramskoy_-_Reading_ woman_(portrait_of_artist%27s_wife).jpg Cover design: Anna Gatti. 13. Sanditon and Suspense I will be talking to you today about Sanditon, the novel which Jane Austen started in the last year of her life but was unable to finish because she was too ill. Sanditon was read by very few people before 1925 when the great Jane Austen scholar R. W. Chapman edited it for publication and gave it its title. And because many people, even those who love Jane Austen’s novels, have not read it, or don’t know it well, I will also be talking about the novels everyone will know, and in particular the two that were published and read in the year of her death, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, brought out in a single volume as neither was quite long enough to suit the expectations of the readers of 1817. Both of these novels, Persuasion which is so many people’s favourite, and Northanger Abbey, which has fewer adherents, but very fanatical ones, have things which poor little Sanditon does not, and I will be talking first about what it does not have, cannot have, at this stage of production, which is: rich and rounded characters, and that hard-to-define ‘air of reality’ which marks the great finished novels. Then I want to talk about what it does have and since my title is about suspense, I will leave you in suspense for a while about those qualities. Sanditon is one of the few works which survive in manuscript in Jane Austen’s handwriting, but I’ll talk first about another surviving fragment, also in her own hand. Everyone will know that among the tantalizingly random scraps of Jane Austen’s writing is a chapter she wrote for the close of Persuasion and then dropped, replacing it with two more chapters which give us the end as we now have it. The survival of the cancelled chapter of Persuasion always makes me feel some of the woe that Mrs. Smith, late in that novel, expresses over the scanty paper trail left by her beloved husband on his death: ‘“this […] happened to be saved […] while many letters and memorandums of real importance had been destroyed”’(II ix 219). Here Mrs. Smith prefigures the © Nora Bartlett, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0216.13 200 Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader emotions of Jane Austen scholars over the centuries when faced with her fragmentary manuscript legacy. In the case of the cancelled chapter, it is thought that, as with her proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither in 1802, Jane Austen said one thing, tossed and turned, and waked to change her mind. Or maybe it took a few sleepless nights, not just one, but it happened over a very short time in July of 1816, just a year before her death, and somehow that ‘cancelled’ version remained in physical existence, when every other manuscript trace of the six mature novels has vanished.1 There is some fascination in the fact that it is Persuasion that leaves this physical trace, since Persuasion begins with the unliterary Sir Walter Elliot poring over a book, and ends, in the final version, withAnne being wooed and won by a letter slipped to her by Captain Wentworth. Lots of reading and writing in Persuasion. In the cancelled chapter, though, the one that didn’t make it past the final cut, Jane Austen has Anne and Captain Wentworth united in what can only be described as a slapstick style by Admiral Croft, who flings them alone together into a room in his rented house in Bath to have an awkward exchange about whether or not Anne is going to marry the man Wentworth thinks is his rival, Mr. Elliot: ‘The Adm. Madam, was this morning confidently informed that you were—upon my word, I am quite at a loss, ashamed—(breathing & speaking quick)—the awkwardness of giving Information of this sort to one of the Parties. You can be at no loss to understand me.’ (Appendix 1, p. 317) Here, Captain Wentworth reverts to calling her ‘Madam’ as he did at Uppercross, and we watch the two of them blushing, stammering and ‘breathing quick’. It is possible to see that this scene was great fun for Jane Austen to write, and that it was necessary for her to jettison it after she had put them through such agonies and a long awkward speech from Captain Wentworth—which would have been his longest speech in the book had it remained, full of ‘it was said […] it was added’, until 1 For two different fine analyses of Austen’s manuscript of the cancelled chapters, see Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005; repr. 2007), pp. 148–68; Jocelyn Harris, A Revolution Almost beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Detroit: University of Delaware Press, 2007), pp. 63–72. 13. Sanditon and Suspense 201 finally Anne puts an end to both their miseries by mumbling almost inaudibly, ‘“There is no truth in any such report”’ (Appendix 1, p. 318). ‘“No truth!”’ Captain Wentworth replies twice. It feels as if he is trying out for a scholarship to RADA, as it does when a moment later he takes her hand and murmurs, ‘“Anne, my own dear Anne!”’ (Appendix 1, p. 318). The tone of exaggeration is palpable, and must have been, almost immediately, apparent to Jane Austen. Where else in her mature work would a hero say, while pressing the heroine’s hand, ‘My own dear Anne!’ Nowhere in Jane Austen’s finished novels would this sort of male hysteria flourish, although we saw lots of it in the youthful Love and Freindship, and in the phony emotionalism of Mr. Elton’s drunken pass at Emma in the snowbound carriage: the seized hand, the clumsy grope and the exclamation points: ‘“Charming Miss Woodhouse! allow me to interpret this interesting silence”’ (I xv 142).2 This sort of effusion has little in common with the restrained, embarrassed, deep feeling (also of course in Emma) of Mr. Knightley’s much later and more successful proposal, or with the final version ofPersuasion . It is wonderful what a few sleepless nights can do for one’s prose! In the rewritten denouement of Persuasion there is, instead, the infinitely subtler walk through Bath which Anne and Captain Wentworth take after ditching Charles Musgrove: ‘smiles reined in […] spirits dancing in private rapture […] words enough […] passed between them’ (II xi 261).