Jane Austen

["You must allow me to present this young lady to you."]

Over the past few weeks, my blogging voice seems to have evaporated from this site. That’s not because I’ve slipped into some eerie library limbo. My time and energies have instead been devoted to preparing a public presentation, “Elusive Jane: In Search of Jane Austen at the New York Public Library.” For ages, it seems, my desk has been buried under a small mountain of books by and about Jane Austen, necessitating a major excavation every time I needed a pencil or a piece of tape. But the hard part is over, and I’m finally ready to meet anyone curious about the life of Jane Austen this Friday, November 6, at 2:15.

Of the many facets of my job here at the New York Public Library, my favorite is the opportunity to get in front of a crowd of people and share my enthusiasm for my favorite authors. Don’t tell anyone, but I also get to read Jane Austen and call it work.

Is it necessary to know anything about Jane Austen’s life in order to appreciate her novels? Certainly not. But after researching the biographies and background materials available here at the library, I found that the novels I had always loved took on a depth and an emotional resonance they hadn’t had before.

Although there are more available biographies of Jane Austen than you would probably care to count, and the facts they contain remain quite consistently the facts, the interpretation of those facts seems to differ from biographer to biographer. It began with James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of his aunt’s life, which first appeared fifty years after her death. This gracefully written, kind, and loving work helped to rekindle interest in Jane Austen’s life and writing and was used by all later biographies as their foundation. At the same time, the Memoir created an essentially false image of a placid spinster who wrote her novels as a sort of hobby and didn’t pay much heed to the world outside her own narrow scope. “Of events her life was singularly barren,” he wrote, “few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of her life.”

This of a woman whose life paralleled the Napoleonic Wars and the American Revolution; who lived through the fears of a French invasion of British soil; whose wide reading included not only novels but histories, accounts of current events, travel books, essays, and religious works; whose cousin brought the French Revolution directly into the family home when her husband lost his head to the guillotine; and whose brothers (both Admirals in the Royal Navy) kept her well informed of events beyond the boundaries of rural Hampshire. It is now clear, as Tony Tanner points out in his critical study Jane Austen that she “was much more aware of contemporary events, debates and issues, of the wars and domestic unrest, of the incipiently visible results of the Industrial Revolution, and of a radical change taking place in the constitution of English society, than the conventional view allows, or perhaps wants to allow.” In addition, Jane Austen was very much a professional author who spent her life developing and perfecting her own manuscripts (which she referred to as her “children”), wrangled with publishers, and was honored by the Prince Regent. She was eventually able to earn an independent living from her writing--a feat few women of the day could boast.

This is the Jane Austen I will be discussing on Friday, November 6th, at 2:15 in the first floor classroom of the New York Public Library. If you can’t make it that afternoon--I’ll be giving the same talk again on December 3rd and January 8th, also at 2:15.

These talks will be alternating with Out of the Blacking Factory, the Charles Dickens presentation I introduced last year, on November 20th, December 18th, and January 22nd.

“Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead baby, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”

— from a letter of Jane Austen to Cassandra, October 27, 1798

The most magical thing about visiting London for the first time was the sense of being so close to the source of the literature I’d spent so much of my life reading. One of my sharpest memories is of the day I turned a corner in the National Portrait Gallery and came unexpectedly upon this likeness of Jane Austen done by her sister, Cassandra. Although I had previously seen reproductions of the unfinished sketch--always of special interest because it is only one of two authenticated images (the other is of Jane seen from the back, face hidden by a bonnet)--coming across the real thing was another matter. Time collapsed, and I felt almost in the physical presence of an author already deeply rooted in my imagination.

Maybe the resemblance is not the most accurate or truthful. The family seemed to think it was not a success. According to R. W. Chapman, when James Edward Austen-Leigh decided to include an etching of the portrait in his memoir, his sister, half-sister, and cousins gave it only “very guarded and qualified approval.” Although it “was not positively inconsistent with their youthful recollections,” they seemed to think that “perhaps it gave some idea of the truth.” Despite their reservations, the actual penciled work with its washes of watercolor is a great deal more delicate and beautiful than any reproduction would lead you to believe, and I stood in the gallery staring at it, transfixed. If there was anything wrong with the image, I thought, it wasn’t Cassandra’s lack of skill in capturing the likeness but rather in her inability to animate it with any of the intelligence, irony, or playfulness which any reader of Jane Austen would expect to find there.  read more »

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me"

— Shakespeare, Richard II

This month marks my one-year anniversary as a blogger for the New York Public Library. A blogger is something I never thought I would refer to myself as, but I suppose there are worse things that can be said about a person. My first post on May 30, 2008 concerned the release of Sex and the City, a movie which featured the library among its New York locations. This was and remains my most-read post. I don’t kid myself into thinking that the world was so desperately waiting to hear from me; I happened to coincide exactly with the release of a much-anticipated movie, based on a television show which it seemed everyone (except me) had watched, which in turn was based on a popular novel.

Mulling over this early post set me to wondering if the movie Sex and the City had driven people back to the Candace Bushnell novel in a sort of self-generating circle. I like to think that almost anything can send us back to books and the experience of reading if we’re so inclined. Or is that simply a case of cock-eyed optimism? Once we become involved with movies and television, is there any time left over for reading; or have the other media splintered our concentration into so many different pieces that there’s no putting them back together again?

After a year’s worth of blogging, I can now confess my belief that one of the worst things about the 21st century is the number of electronic devices created exclusively to waste our time. There are television sets the size of doors with a hundred or so stations that we restlessly flip through, searching for something--anything-- to engage our imaginations. There are hand-held gadgets--the cell phones, iPods, and BlackBerries--that we fiddle with on bus and subway trips as our attention waxes and wanes. And there are the primary culprits, our computers, which leech away time like blood. Sitting before them, we’re like the Time Traveler who, during the trial run of his time machine, nudges the lever ever so slightly, sees nothing in his room has changed, and thinks his experiment a failure. . .until he notices the fresh candle worn down to a stub, indicating several hours gone by in an instant. (Was that a scene from the H. G. Wells novel, the 1960 movie, or the 2002 remake?) Do all these things damage our ability or even desire to focus on a book?

With a somewhat judicious approach, however, computers and gadgets can also lead to books. Despite my initial qualms about the Google book project, it has proved an important resource in my work as a librarian. Although I personally would not want to read a book downloaded onto a little gadget, that doesn’t make the existence of e-book readers any less real. A reader at the main reference desk once raved to me about his Kindle reader because he was visually impaired and could magnify the font size of his text as many times as required, giving me my first positive feeling about something I’d always looked on with a certain scorn. And, ironically, the internet is a great purveyor of real books, too. I admit that I have done my share of killing off the world’s bookstores by ordering lower-priced books online.

As I started to think about these matters, I began to ask myself questions about books being adapted into other media and whether that other media will ever lead us back to the real thing. Now, I know you’re reading this on a computer, and you probably have better things to do with your time, but assuming you’re still with me, I’d like to share these questions with you, give my answers after the break, and invite you to submit your own answers to any or all of them.

1. What was the last movie you saw, adapted from a novel, which disappointed you?

2. What book would you like to see adapted into a movie, even if you know it will ultimately be a disappointment?

3. Are there any theatrical works which have led you to seek out their literary source?

4. Does it work the same way for television? Name a show or shows which drove you to the fictional original. Or the other way around: fiction which drove you to television.

5. Can adaptations be overdone? Should there be a moratorium on adapting any particular author?  read more »

Someone who knows the meaning of everything old being new again is Tim Gunn. Gunn, a former academic at the Parsons School of Design, entered pop culture fame as the host of the television show Project Runway, and other reality series. From his latest tv venture, he has produced a book entitled A Guide to Quality, Taste & Style. The guide book is a particularly Victorian invention, since the Victorians were all such earnest improvers. To see two original examples of this, Lola Montez's The Arts of Beauty (1858) and Mrs. Haweis's The Art of Beauty (1878) come to mind.

Jane Austen, who had a keen knowledge of the pop culture of her time, echoes an opinion held by many. In her novel Mansfield Park, she reproves, "We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be." I'll be watching the sales on Gunn's book...