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Archive for September, 2007

Podcasts About Napoleon

Posted in jane austen, Napoleon on September 9, 2007| 1 Comment »

Military History Podcast features the following podcasts about Napoleon’s life, rise, and fall:

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Jane Austen Character Paper Dolls

Posted in jane austen on September 8, 2007| 5 Comments »


Legacy Design’s Legacy Pride Paper Dolls designs and sells a series of spectacular paper dolls based on literary characters and authors, such as the one of Anne Elliott above. I had highlighted only one or two in a previous post, but the author of Old Grey Pony kindly sent links to a slew of them that I could not ignore. Check out her website, including Georgian Resources, if you haven’t seen them so far and bookmark them. They are well worth the return visits.
Click on these links to find:

Jane Austen
Wentworth
Henry Tilney
Edward Ferrars
Elinor Dashwood
Edmund Bertram
Fanny Price
Emma Woodhouse
Knightly
Elizabeth Bennet
Darcy
Josephine Bonaparte
Revolutionary Fashion

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Silhouettes: Tracing Jane Austen’s Shade

Posted in jane austen, Jane Austen's image, Regency style, tagged , , , on September 7, 2007| 4 Comments »

Before photography, tracing silhouettes was a hugely popular and inexpensive way of capturing a person’s likeness. Even financially stretched families could afford to have a family member stand in front of a light. Their profiles were then traced onto a sheet of paper and cut with scissors. Granted, artistry was involved in the tracing and cutting, for the difference between one person and the next is in the minutest proportions. Should the tracer trace slightly wrong or cut off a tad too much, a different image will result from the original model. Witness these two silhouettes claimed to be of Jane Austen. The first was created around 1800 in Bath.

The second image of Jane, supposedly traced in 1815, shows a more pronounced nose. If one didn’t have the illustration of Jane’s father to compare to this silhouette, one might completely dismiss it. But one can see a distinct resemblance in the shapes of the noses. If this is not an image of Jane (and the Victorian hairdo and high collar or necklace suggest it is not), one can still conclude that the image might be of a family member. Read more about these two images of Jane here.



Learn more about silhouette making in these links:

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A Glimpse of Jane Austen at Work

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on September 6, 2007|

Marianne, “a niece of Austen’s, ” recalls the memory of Jane sitting quietly in the library Godmersham, her sewing on her lap, saying nothing for a long time. Suddenly Jane would burst out laughing, jump up and run across the room to find pens and paper and write something down. Then she would return to her fireside seat and go on stitching quietly as before.


From: Obstinate Heart: A Biography, by Valery Grosvenor Myer, 1997

The quote is from this review: Jane Austen: As Rich a Mix as Any of Her Women, Christopher Lehman, New York Time, April, 1997

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Maid of All Work

Posted in Servants on September 5, 2007| 1 Comment »

On December 1, 1798, Jane Austen wrote her sister Cassandra:

We are very much disposed to like our new maid; she knows nothing of a dairy, to be sure, which, in our family, is rather against her, but she is to be taught it all. In short, we have felt the inconvenience of being without a maid so long, that we are determined to like her, and she will find it a hard matter to displease us.

In days of yore even the lowliest families that could afford it would hire a maid of all work, usually a young girl from an impoverished family. If you recall in Mansfield Park, Fanny Price’s real mother and father employed such a maid. To go without one meant hauling one’s own water, laying the fire, sweeping (which must have been endless), and accomplishing the myriad tasks needing to be done in an age that lacked electricity and internal plumbing.
Next to the scullery maid (who in a large household with many servants, was relegated to perform the meanest duties), the maid-of-all-work had one of the least desirable jobs in the servant hierarchy. Because she was the only servant or one of only a few, all the hard, backbreaking household tasks fell to her. Even Mrs. Beeton, whose expectations of servants was strict, commiserated with this maid’s lot, saying: Her life is a solitary one, and in, some places, her work is never done. She is also subject to rougher treatment than either the house or kitchen-maid, especially in her earlier career.

Learn more about the maid of all work here:

The Cock of Cotton Walk and Maid of All Work, 1820: A Satiric Verse

Illustrations from Pyne’s Microcosm

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