Check out my guest post on the pros and cons of courtship today vs. courtship in Jane Austen's world. It's a question I pondered constantly while writing my latest novel, RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT.
A couple of days ago, Kerri Spennicchia, Assistant Regional Coordinator of JASNA NY forwarded to me the Jane Austen Centre's newsletter with a note "You do know that “Confessions” has been nominated for [a] Regency [World] Award.”
No, Kerri, I didn't! In fact, as a subscriber to the excellent Jane Austen's Regency World magazine, I'd received the newsletter myself earlier in the day. But I hadn't yet looked at the nominees. Nor had it occurred to me that my book might be one of them.
I've been doing the happy dance ever since.
According to The Jane Austen Centre in Bath, which is the sponsoring organization, "the Awards recognise the contribution of the nominees in furthering the
understanding, appreciation and enjoyment of the work of Jane Austen."
Winners are chosen by the public, so please visit The Jane Austen Centre's website and cast your vote. I had the great pleasure of visiting The Jane Austen Centre when I was deep into my research for Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and took a trip to Bath. I'd long been curious about the city that figured so prominently in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, and where key scenes in my own novel take place. I'd read a great deal about Bath prior to my visit, but the one thing that all my reading hadn't prepared me for was the feel of the place. Before I'd spent a full day in Bath I was already thinking to myself: I could live here. In a heartbeat.
What struck me more than anything else about Bath was its own heartbeat. Its energy and vitality. Although going to Bath was like going back in time, it was also a vibrant, wholly alive place.
There was so much to do in Bath that every day was filled with exciting adventures. I went to The Jane Austen Centre and breathed in everything Austen. I took one of The Centre's excellent walking tours of Jane Austen's Bath. I also took an unforgettable walking tour of Georgian Bath led by Bill Haxworth of the Mayor's Corp's of Honourary Guides. I went to the Assembly Rooms and thought of Anne Elliot and Catherine Morland, gazed at the façade of 4 Sydney Place, where Jane Austen once lived, walked in Sydney Gardens, went to Bath Abbey, visited the Pump Room and the King's Baths, the Building of Bath Collection, Number One Royal Crescent, and the Victoria Art Gallery. I sketched, bought a suitcase full of books, wrote scenes for my novel. I left Bath inspired and full of energy, ready to delve back into Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. At the time, I had no idea that my book would ever be published. It certainly never crossed my mind that it might some day be nominated for a Regency World Award. I am deeply grateful to the Jane Austen Centre for this great honor.
Even if you don't win, it's a fascinating thing to contemplate what it
would be like to ride in a barouche, dance at a ball, spend all day
reading and taking turns in the shrubbery instead of answering
emails...oh yeah, what would it be like to give up email, and movies,
and my cellphone, and mascara, and...
Enter by midnight on Friday, September 5, 2008. Good luck!
It was only about six years ago when I looked at pictures of empire-gowned members of the Jane Austen Society of North America and said, "I'll never be one of those people who dresses up in costume and goes to a Regency ball. Isn't that a bit like going to a Star Trek convention and wearing Vulcan ears?"
Lesson #1: Whenever you say, "I'll never be one of those people," what it really means is that you already are one of those people. You just don't know it yet.
Lesson #2: It all starts with English country dance lessons. You know how they talk about gateway drugs? Well, English country dance lessons, my friends, is the gateway drug.
I went to my first dance lesson at the 2004 Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA AGM) , which took place in my part of the world, i.e., Los Angeles. Learning English country dance was, after all, part of my research for my novel, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, which is about a modern L.A. girl who wakes up one morning as a woman in Austen's time. Dance lessons were as legitimate a pursuit as attending the various lectures. Or so I told myself. How could I, in all good conscience, write a dance scene if I had the opportunity to dance and passed it up?
[Here I am dancing with my friend Ron at the 2008 Jane Austen Evening.]
Then came the JASNA ball itself that Saturday night in 2004. Sure, I didn't wear a costume; lots of people didn't. But I danced every dance and not only did I have a blast, I also discovered that English country dance, which in the movies looks like people are merely parading about and posing like peacocks, is actually quite a workout. I also found that when I looked at the women in their gowns this time, I experienced costume envy. I too wanted to wear a dress and pretend I was Elizabeth Bennet dancing with Mr. Darcy. Wouldn't my turns and steps look ever so much more elegant in a Regency ball gown than in black velvet pants? No, I told myself, I won't give in. Costumes are where I draw the line.
Since then I have attended two more JASNA AGMs and two more JASNA balls. Still in contemporary dress. But the turning point came when I attended something last year called the Jane Austen Evening, which is not a JASNA-sponsored event. At the Jane Austen Evening, which is organized by the Society for Manners and Merriment, almost all of the attendees are in costume. Unlike the JASNA balls, where everyone is there because they are Jane Austen readers, the attendees of the Jane Austen Evening appear to be a mixture of Jane Austen readers, period-dance aficionados, people who are into historical re-enactments, and combinations thereof. You can imagine the costumed glory of these folks.
["A whole campful of soldiers!"]
Lesson #3: No one is immune to the costume bug. Case in point: At this year's Jane Austen Evening, I was in the powder room where a number of women were primping. One of them, who was in her early twenties, said to a friend, "I can't believe I'm doing this. I'm actually a t-shirt-and-jeans kind of girl." Another woman, who was perhaps forty and in a gorgeous bright green gown, said, "How about me? I'm an airline mechanic."
You can't make up that kind of dialogue.
Lesson #4: English country dancing can heat you up in more ways than one. The best thing about going to the Jane Austen Evening last year was the fact that I went with my husband Thomas, he who had previously informed me that Regency dancing was the most fundamentally uncool activity he could imagine, and that it would be a cold day in hell…you get the picture. But when the girlfriend who was supposed to go with me couldn't make it, Thomas gallantly offered to take her place. Even took English country dance lessons with me. And that's when I realized that not only is English country dancing a good workout, it's also pretty hot.
It's one thing to dance with one of your girlfriends or some random guy you're not interested in. It's quite another to stand up with the man you find most agreeable in the whole world, the handsomest man who ever was seen, the man who has a noble estate in Derbyshire, I mean, Pasadena. It was then that I truly got why all that serious courting went on at balls in Jane Austen's novels, and why women longed for a dance. Not only was it pretty much the only genteel outlet for vigorous exercise, aside from walking and horse riding; it was the only place that a young man and woman could spend lots of seriously flirtatious face-time with each other. All that eye contact and hand touching and display of bodies was highly charged, and all done with the full sanction of society. No wonder the women were fanning themselves. It was after going to that ball with Thomas that I expanded the ballroom scene in Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. As for Thomas, he had such a good time that this year he decided to invite a group of friends to go with us.
[The handsomest young man that ever was seen...]
At last year's Jane Austen Evening, I wore a long skirt under a knee-length, empire-waisted dress, in a sort of poor man's imitation of a Regency gown. This year, I decided, I would cross the line for good. And so I had a gown made for the occasion. I even had my hair done (admittedly more like big prom hair than authentic Regency hair, but more of a period look than my usual flat-ironed style).
Bring it on, I said. There's no difference between me and those guys who speak Klingon to a friend of mine whenever she ventures into the sci-fi section of her local bookstore. I may not speak Klingon, but I can dance Mr. Beveridge's Maggot like Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle did in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice. Yes, I am a Jane Austen addict, and my version of Vulcan ears is a scarlet silk-taffeta empire-waisted gown.
If you'd like to learn English country dance and you live in Southern California, visit lahacal.org for lessons near you. (You can also link from there to the Jane Austen Evening site.) If you're in another part of the U.S., you can try the English Country Dance Webring; or just do a Google search with the keywords "English country dance" and your geographical area, and you're sure to find something nearby.
And if you'd like to join a warm and welcoming community of fellow Austen addicts, visit the Jane Austen Society of North America at http://jasna.org and find out where your local region meets and what events are going on throughout the year. As for the AGM (and that famous Saturday night ball), this year's event will be held in Chicago.
By the way, the most important thing that the JASNA AGM balls and the Jane Austen Evening have in common, aside from dance and costume, is the abundance of warm and welcoming people. So if you're shy with strangers or don't have a partner to accompany you to these events, never fear.
(I came across a YouTube video of folks dancing the Sir Roger de Coverley at the Jane Austen Evening, and there I am in the foreground dancing with my friend Alice. Video by Larry Buckel. He and his lovely wife Carin helped organize the event:)
Discuss Mansfield Park in your book club, and your friends, like most readers, will tend to differ over a variety of points. The most typical one is this: Is the heroine, Fanny Price, a model of moral integrity, or a self-righteous prude? Is the marriage that ends the story (and Austen's stories always end with a marriage) between the right two people? And what's up with that part about the play?
The story begins when nine-year-old Fanny Price is taken from the home of her impoverished parents and moved to the estate of Mansfield Park to be brought up by rich relatives. This is no clear-cut Cinderella story, however. Although there are a couple of mildly wicked stepsisters (Fanny's cousins Maria and Julia) and a stand-in for a wicked stepmother in the form of her Aunt Norris, teenaged Fanny's central nemesis—and rival in love--is the saucy, sassy anti-heroine Mary Crawford.
The object of both Fanny's and Mary's affections is Fanny's cousin Edmund (I know, I know, but in Jane Austen's day one could marry one's cousin without anyone batting an eyelid). Edmund loves Fanny like a cousin, but he is in love with Mary.
Did you ever feel jealous of someone, and at the same time also felt you didn't have the right to be jealous? Fanny, being in an inferior position in the Mansfield Park family and unloved by her birth parents, has deeply rooted self-esteem issues. Mary, on the other hand, walks through life with a serious sense of entitlement. Shouldn't that be enough to put us squarely in the pro-Fanny camp?
Perhaps, but Fanny challenges us at every turn. For example, there is the famous section of the book in which Fanny disapproves of and refuses to participate in a play that her cousins and neighbors are putting on at home for their own amusement. For this part of the story to make the least bit of sense to a modern reader, one needs to understand that this particular choice of home theatricals would be the modern equivalent of a group of teenagers voting to have a wild, high-risk party in their strict parent's house while said parent was out of town.
Despite Fanny's balking at participating in said wild party, we cannot quite dismiss her as a buzz-killing Miss Perfect. After all, she is eaten up with jealousy for a great deal of the book, and as we all know, jealousy is not a pretty emotion. She is also not one to obey those in authority at all costs. In fact, she stands up to the biggest authority figure in her life by refusing to do what she knows in her heart would be wrong, and I'm not talking about acting in a play. (I'll say no more, lest I spoil the book for those who've yet to read it.)
If you've ever had an opinion that your friends considered uncool, and you stuck to it despite ridicule and pressure, you'll find a kindred spirit in Fanny Price, and you'll want her reward to be the man she loves. However, if you're still doing shots with your inner bad girl, you'll be rooting for Mary Crawford to win the object of her, and Fanny's, affections. (By the way, Austen scholar Emily Auerbach pointed out at one of the Jane Austen Society of North America's annual meetings, that several of Mary Crawford's lines of dialogue are astonishingly similar to lines from Jane Austen's own letters.)
To make things more interesting, some readers will want Fanny to be won by Mary's rakish, heartbreaker brother, Henry Crawford, who finds himself unaccountably in love for the first time in his life. Henry doesn't seem to stand a chance with Fanny, who is not only in love with another man, but also has watched in contempt and pity while Henry toyed with Fanny's cousins, the above-mentioned Maria and Julia. It's one big love triangle. Or square. Or heptagon.
Could there possibly be a better Austen novel for book clubs to chew on? And I haven't even touched on the theories about Mansfield Park's antislavery subtext.
In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen is clearly at the height of her storytelling mastery, deftly playing with reader loyalties and expectations while serving up the delicious social satire and suspenseful plotting that keep us coming back for more.
Nevertheless, Mansfield Park presents clear challenges to filmmakers who wish to adapt it, which is perhaps why director Patricia Rozema turned the heroine of her 1999 adaptation into a synthesis of Fanny Price, Mary Crawford, and Jane Austen herself. As for the latest adaptation of Mansfield Park, which airs on PBS's Masterpiece Classic on Sunday, January 27, I am all anticipation. Let's see what the filmmakers have got up their sleeves this time.
"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." --Henry Tilney, in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
When Henry Tilney speaks these words in Austen’s funny and touching novel, Northanger Abbey, the story’s heroine, Catherine Morland, gets a serious crush. (Truth is, Henry had her at hello.) Still, Henry’s declaration is a bold one, for in Austen’s day novels were considered low art, especially if they were penned by a woman and consumed by women. Catherine favors the lowest of the low--scary Gothic novels written by women and featuring abduction, seduction, supernatural horror, and/or murder—the kind of novels that teens (and many an adult) could not get enough of.
Every era likes to marginalize certain forms of art. In Austen’s day, it was the novel (and not just the Gothic ones). Today, it might be graphic novels or romance or so-called "women’s fiction" or "chick lit" or science fiction or horror. Take your pick. Despite the snobbery, Jane Austen and her whole family were, in her own words, "great Novel-readers, & not ashamed of being so." Nevertheless, Northanger Abbey is a hilarious send-up of just the kind of horror-and-romance-fest that Catherine Morland—and Jane Austen—liked to read. The difference between the heroine and her creator is that Catherine Morland kept expecting real life to play out like one of her favorite novels, while Jane Austen thought real life had its own set of fascinating stories to tell.
Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland’s story unfolds as she leaves home for the first time, bound for the fascinating city of Bath. She falls in love, is whisked off to the romantic-sounding estate of Northanger Abbey, witnesses betrayal and deception, suspects murder, and takes a dangerous journey alone. Ultimately, Catherine learns self-reliance in more ways than one. No
t only does she cease to be, in her mother’s words, "a sad little shatter-brained creature," she also learns to distinguish between her own wild imaginings and her intuition, between fantasy and reality, between false friends and true.
Northanger Abbey is the perfect coming-of-age story, for it is in no way about giving up our youthful fancies and zest for living. Quite the opposite. Through Catherine’s innocent, exuberant embrace of what is fresh and novel (no pun intended), we the readers remember the first time we traveled to a new city, danced with the person who made us feel valued for who we are, or "learnt to love a hyacinth."
[BS:
The great thing about Jane Austen fans is the myriad of reasons they
come to Jane. Some come for the clothes, stay for the satire. Others
seek the social skewering but discover the empathy. And, yeah, there a
few who figure if it's good enough for Colin Firth... Today, we welcome
Laurie Viera Rigler, whose novel Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict captures the beauty of loving Jane while indulging in the ever-tantalizing "what if"]
The decision to write Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict wasn't exactly a decision. It happened like this: I was standing in the kitchen of the house I used to rent in the Highland Park area of Los Angeles, and I saw, in my mind, the opening scene of my book unfold. I saw a twenty-first-century woman who, like me, reads and rereads Jane Austen's six novels. Unlike me, she wakes up one morning in the body and life of an Englishwoman in Austen's time. I couldn't stop thinking about her, and finally I decided to write down what I saw. Once I opened that door, there was, of course, a good deal more to her story.
It wouldn't take a quantum physicist to figure out why Courtney Stone made her appearance in my head. After all, she embodies all the "what if's" I posed in many an idle fantasy indulged after yet another reading of Pride and Prejudice or another viewing of the 1995 BBC adaptation. What if I could hang out in one of those drawing rooms in Jane Austen's world, pretending to do needlework ("pretending" being the operative word for someone who cannot sew) while stealing glances at some hottie in tight knee breeches? Would it be a dream come true to inhabit that world, or a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for? What exactly do Austen's books tell me about her world, and what do they not tell me? What is invisible to me as a contemporary reader? Just how sanitized are even the most "faithful" of the film adaptations? Why do I, with all my freedom and choices as a contemporary woman, fantasize my way into the world of Jane Austen? Writing this book was an opportunity to explore those questions.
There is another question I keep hearing, and it concerns the current spike in the popularity of all things Austen. That question is "Why now?" It is difficult to imagine topping Devoney Looser's hilarious answer (here). Nevertheless, I'll venture a couple of theories.
Here is the first: Quite simply, it's score one for the snowball effect of the collective consciousness. Like Austen's "one shoulder of mutton, you know, drives another," one could say that "one Austen movie drives another quickly through the development process." It is, after all, the films that are sexy enough to grab most of the headlines. And there are at least six of them, two in theatrical release (Becoming Jane and the upcoming Jane Austen Book Club) and at least four coming up on PBS. The books then gratefully hitch a ride on the pop culture express.
Here is another theory, which came out of something my husband said to me the other day when I was obsessing over something of no consequence whatsoever. "The mind," he said, "is an unreliable narrator." His comment led me to ponder whether we are now living in the era of the unreliable narrator--from our widespread distrust of traditional media and Washingtonian mouthpieces to our own overly analytical and self-helped-to-death minds. Perhaps our need for the reliable narrator is stronger now than ever.
For me, there is no narrator more reliable than Jane Austen, the keenest and funniest observer of human nature of any author I know. It is her all-knowing, all-seeing narrator who holds up a mirror to our human failings as well as our capacity for magnificence. It is she who guides us to distinguish truly trustworthy behavior from the posings of those who have nothing to recommend them but a handsome face and an agreeable manner. It is she who shows us how to spot greed, jealousy, arrogance, and vanity at a hundred paces, regardless of how smartly dressed it is. Most of all, it is she who shows us how to laugh at all of it and not take ourselves so seriously. That is why I can't (and wouldn't want to) stop reading and rereading Austen. For me, her six novels constitute the most reliable set of self-help books I could ever want to own. Add to that her gift for storytelling twists and a love story with a satisfying ending, and you've got the perfect recipe for a much healthier sort of addiction than those in which we humans usually indulge.
Austen's hilarious skewering of the follies and flaws of human beings is what makes her novels timeless. Human nature, after all, hasn't changed at all since Austen's day. Nevertheless, I, like many Austen addicts, do find myself drawn to the period details of her world, the window dressing, if you will. What makes these details attractive has little to do with their inherent qualities. After all, empire-waisted gowns are not as well-suited to my figure as they are to say, Gwyneth Paltrow's. And given the choice between spending five hours in my car driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles, as I did the other day, to four bone-jangling days in a horse-drawn carriage, I'd take the car any day. Nevertheless, I am attracted to those details precisely because they are of her world, because they give me greater access to her stories.
And so in writing Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict I was able to indulge another aspect of my addiction, immersion in the details of Austen's world. And yes, when seen through the Hollywood-tinted lenses of postmodern nostalgia, spending four days on the road in a horse-drawn carriage doesn't sound that bad after all. Especially if at the end of your journey you get to sleep in a four-poster bed in a sumptuous mansion and rest up for the ball where you dance with Jeremy Northam and look just like Gwyneth Paltrow in your empire-waisted gown.
Still, I'd venture to say that our deepest yearning isn't merely to escape the noise of modern technology for the bonnets and balls and carriages of Jane Austen's world. We, like our favorite protagonists, long to escape the unreliable narrators of our minds for an omniscient guide who writes our own story, the one with the happy ending.
[BS:Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict is available at bookstores right now, and Laurie Viera Rigler's website
is a treasure trove for fans of Jane, ready-to-become fans of Jane, or
just people who understand the value that comes from wasting time on a
really fun site. Laurie is also making appearances in support of her
novel.]
