Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
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 perceptve essays. Prof. Richard Cronin, University of Glasgow This volume presents an exhilaratng and insightul collecton of essays on Jane JANE AUSTEN Austen – distlling the author’s deep understanding and appreciaton of Austen’s works across a lifetme. The volume is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptve analysis of individual scenes to the exploraton of motfs across Austen’s fcton. Full of astute connectons, these lively discussions hinge on the study of human behaviour – from family relatonships to sickness and hypochondria – highlightng Austen’s artul literary techniques and her powers of human observaton. Jane Austen: Refectons of a Reader by (the late) Nora Bartlet is a brilliant contributon to the feld 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 conversaton about Austen’s works. As such, it will appeal widely to all lovers of Jane Austen, whether frst-tme readers, students or scholars. As with all Open Book publicatons, this entre book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital editons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover image: Woman Reading, Portrait of Sofa Kramskaya by Ivan Kramskoi (1837–1887). Cover design: Anna Gat. book eebook and OA editons also available JANE AUSTEN Reflections of a Reader oBp To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: htps://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1196 Open Book Publishers is a non-proft independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. JANE AUSTEN Jane Austen Reflections of a Reader Nora Bartlett Edited by Jane Stabler 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: Refections 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 efort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notifcation 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 Sofa Kramskaya (after 1866), Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Kramskoy_-_Reading_ woman_(portrait_of_artist%27s_wife).jpg Cover design: Anna Gatti. Contents Preface vii Jane Stabler A Note on Texts xvii 1. Reading Pride and Prejudice over Fifty Years 1 2. Sense and Sensibility 19 3. Mothers and Daughters in Jane Austen 41 4. Mrs. Jennings 63 5. Lady Susan 77 6. In Sickness and in Health: Courting and Nursing in Some 93 Jane Austen Novels 7. Food in Jane Austen’s Fiction 113 8. Emma and Harriet: Walking Companions 133 9. Emma in the Snow 149 10. What’s Wrong with Mansfeld Park? 155 11. Jane Austen and Grandparents 175 12. Jane Austen and Burns 187 13. Sanditon and Suspense 199 Bibliography 215 Index 223 Preface Jane Stabler Nora Bartlett (1949–2016) was an inspirational teacher of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fction at the Universities of Oxford and St Andrews. Among her many areas of expertise, she was a superlative reader of Jane Austen, whose novels she frst enjoyed at the age of six and carried on reading and re-reading almost every year for the rest of her life. After her death from an aggressive and terrifyingly swift oesophageal cancer at the age of only sixty-seven, her husband, the historian Robert Bartlett, gathered her Jane Austen papers and identifed a press that would publish them. They were to appear as Nora had delivered them, written in an informal oral register for a general audience. Nora was well aware of recent Austen scholarship, but she recognised that for the vast majority of Austen’s readers who were not academics, the shared pleasure and sometimes frustration of reading the novels themselves and their relationship with what Nora called ‘the texture of reality’ was what should be at the heart of any literary discussion.1 Her Austen talks are presented here as she left them, with minimal editorial intervention to identify quotations and provide the necessary critical context that Nora would have given in extempore asides to her audience. Nora knew Austen so well that she usually quoted short passages from memory and she drew other allusions freely from her extensive reading across all periods of literature and flm. Her occasional creative reimaginings of Austen are the efect of Austen’s immediacy, a process of readerly response Nora describes in her frst talk (‘we speak in our heads lines she never wrote’), which is often revealing in a diferent way from 1 Nora Bartlett, ‘An Excerpt from my Unpublished Writing’, in On Gender and Writing, ed. by Michelene Wandor (Boston: Pandora, 1983), pp. 10–16 (p. 11). © Jane Stabler, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0216.14 viii Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader an accurate quotation. Where this is the case and Nora’s distinctive infection serves as a vehicle for a motif in the talk as a whole, her gloss on Austen or other authors has been left intact and the original reference is given in a footnote. These talks were written over several decades, and delivered on separate occasions to Jane Austen Society of Scotland gatherings, undergraduate literary societies, book clubs, to her students in continuing education programmes and the occasional academic symposium. Some of them subsequently appeared as blogs, generously donated to former students; some sections were eventually published as parts of more academic articles in journals such as Persuasions.2 Nora’s insights about the signifcance of mourning at the start of Sense and Sensibility, for example, appeared in a Festschrift for the legal and literary scholar, William Ian Miller.3 Across all these talks, readers will recognise the way Nora circled around particular themes, studying them from a variety of angles and turning them about so that her regular audience could appreciate diferent facets of apparently familiar plots. The fnal versions of all the talks that follow were selected by her husband. They exemplify Nora’s deep but lightly worn erudition, her sense of humour and her generosity of spirit. We can savour her quizzical observations of family life, forbearance of more egotistical members of the academic community, concern for the young men and women who were her students and how they might fourish, an American concern about British standards of healthcare (mediated by her sister, who remained living in Rochester, New York, where Nora grew up), relish of tray bakes and a wonderful capacity for fellowship with others. Nora was a tireless correspondent, managing to sustain an astonishing number of multi-stranded conversations through text, email and shared New Yorker cartoons. Like Austen, Nora enjoyed a strong epistolary connection with her sister, who was a confdante and the alibi for her stringent observations of human foibles; unlike Austen, Nora shared her 2 Nora Bartlett, ‘Deaths and Entrances: The Opening of Sense and Sensibility’, Persuasions On-line, 32.2 (2012), http://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol32no2/ bartlett.html? 3 Nora Bartlett, ‘Silence as a Weapon of Self-Defence in Sense and Sensibility’, in Emotion, Violence, Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of William Ian Miller, ed. by Kate Gilbert and Stephen D. White (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 344– 50, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004366374_019 Preface ix intellectual life with her husband for whom she was the frst and best reader of all he wrote. These are the critical essays of someone who was clearly herself a novelist. In 1983 when she was in her early thirties, Nora published a wryly self-deprecating article on what it was like to be an unpublished novelist. Some of the insights she articulated courageously and unself- sparingly in that short but very powerful piece of writing help to explain her close attention to Austen’s sense of herself as a writer. Nora described her own writing life as ‘a pattern of continual interruptions’.4 Unlike Austen, it was the experience of motherhood at the age of twenty-four that propelled her into writing her frst novel: ‘nothing in my life’, she wrote, ‘ever surprised me so much as what happens to women when they have children’.