Authors on Authors (Part 3)

A lot of books I'm mentioning this year seem either to be about Jane Austen or by Sylvia Townsend Warner... so it is appropriate that one of them is Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner!  It's in the same Writers and Their Work series as Pamela Hansford Johnson's pamphlet, mentioned yesterday, and I'll write a similarly swift post about it.

PHJ on ICB nabbed the Century of Books slot for 1951, so STW on JA will just have to wait on the sidelines... but I rather suspect it will appeal to more of you.  Austen has more adoring fans than Dame Ivy, but are also significantly more spoilt for choice... This is, perhaps, hardly the only or foremost resource for information about Austen's life and work, but I am a sucker (as this mini-series demonstrates) for authors talking about authors.  The combination of Warner and Austen is my favourite yet, and I loved reading Warner's thoughts on the various novels.  She more or less bypasses biographical detail, which was fine by me - there are plenty of other places to go for that.  Instead we get to read Warner's insightful responses to Austen's work.  She doesn't propose dramatic or revisionist readings of the novels, but there are lots of gems along the way.  I loved this:

though sense distinguishes Elinor Dashwood and sensibility her sister Marianne, the contrast is between two ways of behaving rather than between two ways of feeling

and, a bit longer, this:

Of all Jane Austen's novels, Emma must fully conveys the exhiliration of a happy writer. As the arabesques of the plot curl more intricately, as the characters emerge and display themselves, and say the very things they would naturally say, the reader - better still, the re-reader - feels a collaborating glow.  Above all, it excels in dialogue: not only in such tours de force as Miss Bates being grateful for apples, Mrs. Elton establishing her importance when she pays her call at Hartfield, but in the management of dialogue to reveal the unsaid; as when Mr. John Knightley's short-tempered good sense insinuates a comparison with his brother's drier wit and deeper tolerance; or as in the conversation between Mr. Knightley and Emma about Frank Churchill, whom neither of them know except by repute: Emma is sure he will be all that he should be, Mr. Knightley's best expectation is "well grown and good-looing, with smooth, plausible maners" - and by the time they have done, it is plain that Emma is not prepared to fall in love with Frank Churchill, and that Mr. Knightley has been, for a long time, deeply and uncomfortably in love with Emma.

It is a shame, given Warner's sensitive and alert reading of Austen's writing, that she does not recognise the irony dripping when Austen wrote about her 'little bit (two Inches long) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour.'  Read in context - or even out of context -  it is clear that Austen has tongue firmly in cheek, and it's curious that Warner (herself so often ironic) does not spot this.  Never mind.

What I think I love most about Warner's writing in any context - her novels, letters, this pamphlet - is her exuberant use of imagery.  I probably mention it every time I review something by her, but it is delicious - usually quite surreal, but somehow fitting, and often animalistic.  She writes extensively about Austen's juvenilia, and says that they 'have a ringing brilliancy, like the song of a wren'.  Lovely!  And later she writes:

G.H. Lewes, when he recommended Charlotte Bronte to "follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen's mild eyes", was unaware of Lady Susan, where Miss Austen's eyes are those of a hunting cat. 

Oh, Warner - you and cats!  She can turn anything around to cats, given enough time - and is thus, in my eyes, a kindred spirit.

As I said earlier, there are many other places to read about Austen.  This pamphlet was issued at a time when a more or less complete bibliography could still be compiled (and one is included - with less than three pages of critical material) but now it proliferates.  The reason I would recommend Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner amongst this extensive canon is for the particular insight one excellent novelist is able to shed upon another.  STW and JA have been perfectly matched.

Authors on Authors (Part 1)

I'm away this week, off up to Newcastle to give a conference paper, then to one of very my best friends' wedding in Worcester at the weekend (very exciting!) so I've prepared a mini-series of posts to appear in my absence.  It's not another lot of My Life in Books, I'm afraid, but it isn't too far away... the next three posts will be on books about books.  Or, more precisely, authors discussing authors: each of the three books/pamphlets are about famous authors, by our sort of middlebrow authors.  Fun!

First up, and taking the spot for 1943 in A Century of Books, is Talking of Jane Austen by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern.  My housemate Mel gave this to me for my birthday in 2010 (thanks, Mel!) knowing how much I'd enjoyed its sequel, More Talk Of Jane Austen.  Yes, I'm doing these things the wrong way around, but it doesn't much matter which order you read these books in - except that I would argue Talking of Jane Austen is even better.

The book is divided into fifteen essays, alternatively by Kaye-Smith and Stern.  Proceedings kick off with 'Introducing Sheila Kaye-Smith to Jane Austen' and 'Introducing G.B. Stern to Jane Austen', where our esteemed authoresses recount how they first came to read Austen - sheepishly admitting their early disregard of her, and triumphantly rejoicing in the moments (both with Emma, incidentally) where they discovered their lasting affinity with Jane.  Their love of Jane shines through every paragraph - this is an appreciation, but one from calm hearts and careful minds.  They do not run mad nor faint, rather they love both wisely and well.

To enter that world is to visit a congenial set of friends, and I still find that in their company I lose my own cares, much as I lost them on my first visit, thirty years ago.  Jane Austen is the perfect novelist of escape - of legitimate escape, such as are our holidays.  She does not transport one into fantasy but simply into another, less urgent, set of facts.  She tells no fairy-tale which might send us back dazzled and reeling to our contacts with normal life, but diverts us from our preoccupations with another set of problems no less real than our own, but making no personal demands upon us.  In fact it is her realism which provides the escape, for the fantastic and improbable only irritate certain minds and send them hurrying back unrefreshed to their own business.

Amongst the topics addressed are the education of female characters; a re-evaluation (now a fairly standard argument) or Henry and Maria Crawford; dress and food in the novels; the device of letter-writing... a wide-ranging group of intriguing minutiae.

Perhaps the bravest section is where Stern and Kaye-Smith turn their attention to characters which they consider failed.  Avert your eyes if you consider St. Jane to be infallible.  Even more bravely, this is how Stern prefixes the discussion:

When an author fails with one of her characters, it must, I think, be defined as a lack of perception, a certain bluntness of outlook where this particular character is concerned.  For where the author is aware she has failed, she will be compelled to do something about it: alter it, cut it, add to it, so that it will remain an uneven lop-sided conception with some irrelevant good scenes and some hopeless; showing traces of exasperated tinkering.  Where a character is a plain failure, evenly spread, we can usually detect some slight complacency in its creator.

And whose names are suggested?  Well, Stern and Kaye-Smith cannot agree on some of them, but amongst their nominations are Colonel Brandon, Eleanor Tilney, Lady Russell, Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh.  Since those final three characters are amongst my favourite in all the novels, I shall maintain a dignified silence on the topic.  (How could they!)  Ahem.

Perhaps the most fun section is at the end, where is all becomes something of a miscellany.  There are twenty pages of incidental comments and observations, or thoughts which were not quite sufficient to be developed into a whole chapter.  Here's just one of 'em, courtesy of Sheila Kaye-Smith:

No two authors, you might think, would be less likely to have their work mistaken for each other's than Jane Austen and Aldous Huxley.  Nevertheless I have recently seen a quotation from the author of Pride and Prejudice attributed to the author of Eyeless in Gaza.  It was in a review of the screen version of Pride and Prejudice, for the script of which Hollywood, with its fine sense of fitness, had made Mr. Huxley responsible.  The critic, having congratulated him on the complete suppression of his literary personality in this task, goes on to say that one piece of dialogue, however, stands out unmistakably as his own.  He then quotes Sir William Lucas's commendation of dancing as "one of the first refinements of polished society", with Darcy's reply: "Certainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of the world - every savage can dance."

If you're not already a Janeite, this probably isn't a good place to start.   Indeed, you should probably have read all of Austen's books at least once before you even consider reading Talking of Jane Austen.  The authors are contentedly aware of this themselves, and welcome anyone (is it you?) who fits the description below:

We are not prowling round, my collaborator and myself, searching for converts; only for those insatiable legions who find the same mysterious pleasure as we do in talking Jane, discovering Jane, arguing Jane, quoting Jane, listing Jane, and for ever and ever marvelling at Jane and grateful for her legacy.

And so say all of us!

Jane Austen by Margaret Kennedy

One day in, and the first book for A Century of Books is completed.  Truth be told, I read the first two-thirds in 2011, but spent this afternoon finishing it off.  It's a bit of a cheat, because although it was published 1950, it's one of those not-very-of-its-time books - being Jane Austen by Margaret Kennedy.

I was sorting through my books in Somerset and found a paper bag filled with books from my aunt, which she was either lending or giving to me back in 2004 (Jacq - which was it?!) and discovered this book in it.  I've yet to read anything by Margaret Kennedy (despite getting a lovely copy of Together and Apart for Christmas) and I had no idea that she'd written a book about Jane Austen.  Being in the mood for a little quirky non-fiction, I picked it up and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Apparently it was the first in a series called The English Novelists, and it is part-biography, part-criticism.  In fact, it's mostly an assessment of Austen's various novels - written by an unashamed fan, but one who is not incapable of pointing out what she believes to be areas for improvement.  Her views are unusual - how many of us would call Mansfield Park 'the most important of the novels, the most ambitious in theme, and the best example of her powers'? - but it's a good look through the eyes of an perceptive reader of the 1950s, to see how Austen was estimated sixty years ago.

Jane Austen is scarcely more than a hundred pages long, but Kennedy packs a lot in, with precise organisation.  In fifteen pages she covers 'The Background'; a wonderfully informative summary of the novels which preceded Austen's.  Then Kennedy covers 'The Life' in fourteen pages, thereby providing as good an overview as you're likely to encounter in many books ten times that length.  It is a more modern phenomenon to elaborate where details are not known, or invent suppositions where discretion is more flattering.  Austen's momentary engagement, for example, is not mentioned.  Was it not known in 1950?

The next sections onto 'The Letters', which are often held up simply as an example of the biographer's disappointment.  Kennedy is no different:

To search through these letters for any trace of the novels is a most disheartening task.  It is not merely that the books themselves are scarcely ever mentioned; there is so little trace of the material from which the books were made.  We feel as some archaeologist might, who comes upon some large and promising mass of fragments buried under a lost city once famous for its art, and finds that they are all shards of coarse kitchen ware; that every trace of sculpture, urns, tiles, tablets and inscriptions has been scrupulously removed.  It is with gratitude that we identify a few cooking pots.  There is a Moor Park apricot tree at Chawton; we remember one at Mansfield Parsonage.  Isabella Thorpe advised Catherine Morland to read The Midnight Bell; here is Mr. Austen reading it at an inn.

I do not entirely agree with this estimation of Austen's extant letters, but I love the image Kennedy devises.  I also love the sensitive way she explores the difference between Austen's early and later letters.  Like everything else in Kennedy's book, it's a speedy but excellent summary and assessment.

And then the chapters for which I was waiting.  'The Novels - First Period' and 'The Novels - Second Period'; 'Some Criticisms' and 'Jane Austen's Place in Literature'.  It's no secret that I love Austen's novels, and I especially like reading about her novels - an area understandably skirted around by those with a strictly biographical outlook.  In these, Kennedy gives quick outlines of the novels, before delivering her own verdict - always admiring, but never gushing.  She knows Austen's characters as well as her own friends and family - watching their actions, carefully considering their qualities, and understanding the work of the author all the while.

At twenty-one she has served her term.  She knows what she wants to say.  She has discovered how to say it.  First Impressions, afterwards called Pride and Prejudice, is written with all the fresh exhilaration of that discovery.  It has faults which are to disappear in the later books, but never again is she to write with quite the same vitality and high spirits as she does in this first spring of her powers.  They give it a quality which makes very many of her readers choose it as their favourite.

We are told that it was extensively polished, corrected and revised between 1796 and 1813, when it was published.  But its great merit must have been inherent in the first draft, since characters spring to life at once or never, and truth is one of the things which cannot be "put in afterwards."

I'm not sure I agree with this somewhat whimsical statement, but I would very much like to.  However, what makes Kennedy's analysis of the novels so worth reading is her own status as a novelist.  She writes of the characters with an authorial eye; she critiques their well-roundedness or believability with the voice of one who has striven at the same tasks and encountered the same obstacles.  I especially liked her imagined scenario of Austen considering Jane Fairfax as a heroine, and being gradually swayed to focus instead upon Emma Woodhouse.

In the final sections of the book, Kennedy considers views of Jane Austen from her death onwards, and is especially good on Charlotte Bronte's notorious bad-mouthing of Austen (without getting as vicious and biting as I would.)  I'm once again amazed that Kennedy can write so economically - covering such ground in so few words.

I cannot think of a better person to write a book like this.  Being both a novelist and an Austen addict, she has both the authority and the affection to write a book which is knowledgeable and perceptive, but never cold or detached.  Anybody who could write the following wins my approval:

Kitty is better managed; her complete insignificance is so well relieved by the untimeliness of her coughing fits.

Austen isn't lacking in admirers and there is no shortage of words written about her.  A slim 1950 hardback will probably get lost amidst the Tomalins, Jenkins, Le Fayes etc. - but I would definitely encourage you to seek it out.  As a reader and a writer, Kennedy has written a beautiful little book which is a stone's-throw away from an appreciation - but with an authorial acumen which prevents it being the enthused ravings of someone like me, who, without Kennedy's restraint, would doubtless fill all 107 pages with the single sentence I LOVE YOU, JANE AUSTEN, I FLIPPIN' LOVE YOU.

A Century of Books has got off to a good start!

The Carbon Copy

My laptop has arrived! And, what's more, it seems to be working. So I'm back regular blogging, but before I bring you up to speed on the things I've read this year, we still have to hear about The Carbon Copy (also know as Colin) and his favourite read of 2008 - and the whole family circle is complete! Despite having quite a different taste in books from me, I think you'll find his choice rather at home here... over to Colin:
2008 may well have been the first year in which I read more non-fiction than fiction, and of those non-fiction books I read, William Hague's biography of William Wilberforce stands out – this, unsurprisingly, as much a testament to the wonders of Wilberforce's life as to Hague's writing style.

Indeed, it is some time since I was blown away by a work of fiction – which is sad – and a number of the 'classics' have left me relatively unmoved. But there is always safe ground in Jane Austen, and I'm perpetually surprised by how few of her books I have read, especially considering there were only six to speak of. I pushed myself up to four this year, by reading Northanger Abbey.

If I can have a complaint about Austen, it's that she doesn't stray far from template: boy meets girl. Boy and girl face insurmountable boundaries. Boy and girl dance. Boy and girl marry. And I hope I'm not spoiling the story too much when I tell you that Northanger Abbey sticks pretty much to the script, with the same healthy doses of pleasant-looking baddies and unpleasant-looking goodies that you'll find in any of Austen's other novels. Well, with the possible exceptions of Persuasion and Mansfield Park, which I've yet to read.

But Northanger Abbey is marked out by being a satire on the gothic novel, with haunted bedrooms and mysterious doors scattered about the place. How pertinent a satire this is, I cannot really say – the gothic novel is not my bag – but I have to admit I could have done without it. Essentially, the satire is limited to a couple of rather heavy-handed chapters that the novel would flow rather better without.

The satire aside, this is an excellently observed love story of the quality you would expect from Austen. I believe some have criticised the Austen men as being slightly two-dimensional: if they have, they are wrong. There is nothing so admirable as an Austen hero, and I think I speak for the vast majority of men when I say that I would like to see something of myself in Mr Tilney. He is not especially complicated, but he is loving, thoughtful and honourable. Male or female, I defy anyone not to root for Tilney and Catherine to get together.

Speaking of whom, Catherine Morland, despite being no one's idea of a heroine, manages the peculiar Austen trick of being an all-round nice girl without making you want to vomit, and without being 'feisty' (urgh). The supporting cast could generally be plucked from other novels (Mrs Allen owes something to Mrs Bennet, Mr Tilney Sr is not unlike Mr Woodhouse, you could be forgiven for confusing Isabella with Mrs Elton, and so on) but the characters are strong nonetheless.

All in all, I have not been shaken in the idea that Austen's novels are rather formulaic; however, when you've practically invented the formula and do it better than anyone else can, I say stick to the formula.