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Posts Tagged ‘Oxford World’s Classics’

A Memoir of Jane Austen

Posted in Book review, jane austen, Jane Austen Novels, tagged , , on July 28, 2008| 2 Comments »

Dear Readers, This post was originally published in 2007. Since then, Oxford World’s Classics has reissued A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections by J.E. Austen-Leigh with a list of illustrations, a family tree, an introduction by Kathryn Sutherland, and additional family recollections by Henry Austen, Anna Lefroy, and Caroline Austen. Letters are included in the appendix of this rich book, which is filled with the most interesting details about Jane’s life and thoughts:

She certainly took a kind of parental interest in the beings whom she had created, and did not dismiss them from her thoughts when she had finished her last chapter. We have seen, in one of her letters, her personal affection for Darcy and Elizabeth; and when sending a copy of ‘Emma’ to a friend whose daughter had been lately born, she wrote thus: ‘I trust you will be as glad to see my “Emma,” as I shall be to see your Jemima.’ She was very fond of Emma, but did not reckon on her being a general favourite; for, when commencing that work, she said, ‘I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.’ She would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of some of her people. In this traditionary way we p. 158learned that Miss Steele never succeeded in catching the Doctor; that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her uncle Philip’s clerks, and was content to be considered a star in the society of Meriton; that the ‘considerable sum’ given by Mrs. Norris to William Price was one pound; that Mr. Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr. Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word ‘pardon.’ Of the good people in ‘Northanger Abbey’ and ‘Persuasion’ we know nothing more than what is written: for before those works were published their author had been taken away from us, and all such amusing communications had ceased for ever.


During her life and shortly after her death, Jane Austen’s novels were not popularly known. Oh, she had her admirers, most notably the Prince Regent, to whom she dedicated Emma, and a few other distinguished personages, such as Lord Macaulay, Lord Byron’s wife, Ann, and writers Philip Sheridan and Robert Southey. But her works languished in relative obscurity until her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh wrote A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869. His book was well so well received that he quickly published a second edition in 1871 that expanded on the first one.

In the memoir, Edward’s recollections and those of his family, including Jane’s nieces and nephews, all of whom remembered their aunt fondly, made Jane accessible to a fresh, new audience. Along with these family recollections, are letters from Jane to various people outside her family. The one below is written to a Mr. J. S. Clarke, librarian, Carlton House in 1815, two years before her death:

Dec. 11. ‘Dear Sir,—My “Emma” is now so near publication that I feel it right to assure you of my not having forgotten your kind recommendation of an early copy for Carlton House, and that I have Mr. Murray’s promise of its being sent to His Royal Highness, under cover to you, three days previous to the work being really out. I must make use of this opportunity to thank you, dear Sir, for the very high praise you bestow on my other novels. I am too vain to wish to convince you that you have praised them beyond their merits. My greatest anxiety at present is that this fourth work should not disgrace what was good in the others. But on this point I will do myself the justice to declare that, whatever may be my wishes for its success, I am strongly haunted with the idea that to those readers who have preferred “Pride and Prejudice” it will appear inferior in wit, and to those who have preferred “Mansfield Park” inferior in good sense. Such as it is, however, I hope you will do me the favour of accepting a copy. Mr. Murray will have directions for sending one. I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in your note of Nov. 16th. But I assure you I am not. The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man’s conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy, of which I know nothing; or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving. A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress. ‘Believe me, dear Sir, ‘Your obliged and faithful humbl Sert. ‘Jane Austen.’

As a result of Edward’s memoirs, the public embraced Jane Austen’s novels. Josephine Ross writes on page 3 in Jane Austen: A Companion, “Jane Austen had won the ‘admiration, even to fanaticism, of innumerable readers’; and in the years that followed, amid a surge of articles, essays, critical studies and reprints of her novels, the unmarried daughter of a Georgian vicar, who had feared to be made ‘a wild beast’ by her contemporaries, was to become one of the best-known authors in the English language.”

You can read Edward Austen-Leigh’s memoirs by clicking on this link to the Gutenberg Project. However, the Oxford’s World’s Classics edition will give you a more detailed view of Jane through her family’s memoirs and letters.

For additional information, you can also trace the origins of Jane Austen’s popularity in this link. Click here.

  • Image of Jane Austen’s portrait: Oxford World’s Classics book cover, which is available at Amazon.com in the UK and the U.S.

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Lady Susan: A Vicious Jewel

Posted in Book review, jane austen, Jane Austen Novels, Northanger Abbey, tagged , , , on July 16, 2008| 7 Comments »

The reissue of the Oxford World’s Classic Northanger Abbey includes Jane Austen’s lesser known works: Lady Susan, The Watsons (a fragment), and Sanditon (Jane’s unfinished last work). As with Pride and Prejudice, this new publication comes with an introduction (excellently written by Claudia L. Johnson, but included in a previous edition) and a wealth of resources in the form of explanatory notes, source bibliography, and appendix. So much has been written about Northanger Abbey by experts whose knowledge of that excellent work eclipse mine, that I will concentrate on one of Jane’s more fascinating but lesser known earlier works, Lady Susan. This book was written around 1793-1794 (there are several date estimates) but it was not published until 1871 in Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen, almost a half century after Jane Austen’s death. While Jane recopied the book she did not revise it; it was evidently never meant for publication.

Author Joe Queenan included Lady Susan in his 2004 volume, The Malcontents: The Best Bitter, Cynical, and Satirical Writing in the World, Explaining why he chose this short work for his book, he writes:

Why did I choose Jane Austen’s less famous and somewhat atypical Lady Susan rather than an excerpt from Sense and Sensiblility, Emma, or Pride and Prejudice? Because as much as possible I wanted to use complete works rather than fragments, and because this little jewel is unbelievably vicious. Also , it is a superb example of the novel composed entirely of letters, and one can never have too many of those in a collection. – p 22.

If you have not read Lady Susan before, be prepared to encounter an anti-Jane heroine; a beautiful, manipulative, calculating, and self-indulgent widow; a woman so cold-hearted in her machinations that she puts her own interests ahead of her daughter’s, or anyone else’s for that matter. Having become accustomed to the innate goodness of Jane’s heroines, I had to read the following passage twice before I fully understood that Lady Susan was made of different stuff than Elizabeth Bennet or Anne Elliot:

I have been called an unkind mother, but it was the sacred impulse of maternal affection, it was the advantage of my daughter that led me on; and if that daughter were not the greatest simpleton on earth, I might have been rewarded for my exertions as I ought.

Sir James did make proposals to me for Frederica; but Frederica, who was born to be the torment of my life, chose to set herself so violently against the match that I thought it better to lay aside the scheme for the present. I have more than once repented that I did not marry him myself; and were he but one degree less contemptibly weak I certainly should: but I must own myself rather romantic in that respect, and that riches only will not satisfy me.

In this short passage Lady Susan reveals her true thoughts to her friend, Alicia Johnson, an equally cool and calculating character.  Lady Susan pretends to be a loving mother and friend, but her frank words belie her actions, and she clearly exults in her talent for manipulating a situation (or man) to suit her needs. She lies without compunction to her sister-in-law, Catherine, a woman she disliked so intensely that she tried to prevent her marriage to her brother. Catherine, no simpering fool, mistrusts her unwanted house guest, and in most situations sees right through her.

The cat and mouse games played by the main characters set up the emotional tension in this novel. Lady Susan believes she is fooling everyone, although she is not. Her brash plans quickly unravel as her equally savvy opponents outmaneuver her, but before her downfall, she collects victims along the way, in particular Mrs. Mainwaring, whose marriage is destroyed by Lady Susan’s flirtation with her husband. Reginald de Courcy, Catherine’s brother, arrives on the scene full of mistrust and dislike for the non-grieving widow. Lady Susan effortlessly wraps him around her little finger until he learns the truth about her.  In the end she marries Sir James, the young and foolish but rich young man she had chosen for her daughter.

As Jay Arnold Levine pointed out in ‘Lady Susan: Jane Austen’s Character of the Merry Widow, Lady Susan is reminiscent of the lascivious and hypocritical widows written about in 18th century Restoration literature, like Fielding’s Lady Booby and Tom Jones‘ Lady Bellaston.  “Dangerously endowed with experience and independence”, Lady Susan “must be regarded as the culmination of the earlier phase of literary burlesque.”

Susan Anthony’s point of view differs from Mr. Levine’s, although it is not incompatible with it. In ‘The Perfect Model of a Woman’: Femininity and Power in Lady Susan, she writes:

Imperceptibly, we are drawn into this sparser imaginative world. We become alert to the cross-play of purposes, aware of suspect motivation, hidden agendas, and the deceptiveness of Language. Lady Susan gradually exposes the politics of family life and the machinations of women in a conservative, restrictive, and male-dominated society, founded on inherited wealth and policed by gossip: the option of ‘the world.’…Lady Susan makes apparent that money, power, and the freedom to act independently are the prerogatives of men. For a woman, even wealth cannot empower: it serves simply to license any fortune-hunter she is foolish enough to marry.

Jane’s epistolary novel is a remarkable and sophisticated achievement for a budding 20-year-old author. There are faults to be sure (Claudia Johnson calls Lady Susan’s world “cartoonish”), and the ending is abrupt and switches from the first-person letter to the third-person narrative, but one cannot mistake Jane Austen’s genius in telling this tale of a woman who “has the power to inflame” but not the power to direct her life. The book ends unhappily for our protagonist. As Susan Anthony observes, “Disappointment of a bad husband is Lady Susan’s fitting punishment,” but before that denouement, the reader has been taken on a splendid literary ride.

More Links:

  • ‘Lady Susan: Jane Austen’s Character of the Merry Widow’, Jay Arnold Levine, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol 1, No. 4, Nineteenth Century. (Autumn, 1961), pp. 23-34.

Image: Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffold, Mistress of George II, painted by Charles Jervas

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Oxford World’s Classics: Pride and Prejudice Revisited

Posted in Book review, jane austen, Jane Austen Novels, Pride and Prejudice, tagged , on June 26, 2008| 4 Comments »

At first I was skeptical of the new Oxford World’s Classics reissues of Jane Austen’s famous novels. After all, didn’t I own a slew of editions from various well-known publishers already? And how different could each be from the other? The central core of these novels – Jane’s words – remains essentially unchanged, although a few of my books are illustrated, and one is the estimable Annoted Pride and Prejudice edited by David M. Shapard. So I asked myself: Why would Oxford University Press spend so much money and effort reissuing classics that it had first published in paperback form in 1980, and brought back in 1998, 2004, and now again this year?

Then I received my package of books from Oxford University Press. First, the cover illustrations are luscious. Pride and Prejudice’s jacket boasts a detail of a Sir Thomas Lawrence portrait of Mrs. Edward John Littleton. And second, this book contains the sort of information that rounds out the reading experience for both the experienced and novice reader.

I read recently that a reissue is only as good as its introduction. Written by scholars and authorities on the topic, a book’s introduction should add to our understanding of the work. Fiona Stafford, a Reader in English at the University of Oxford, does just that. Her essay discusses how Jane engages the reader with the text, and how she invites our speculations about the characters.

Part of [the novel’s] satisfaction, perhaps, is the persistent involvement of the reader in the narrative. Again and again, we are led into mild questioning about what has taken place, and thus encouraged to come up with a workable solution. Conversations between Jane and Elizabeth frequently offer alternative explanations for conduct or character and, in so doing, engage the reader in the debate. Is Mr. Bingley in love with Jane? Can Mr. Wickham be believed? How can Charlotte Lucas be engaged to Mr. Collins? – p. xix

Ms. Stafford also discusses the history of the epistolary novel and its influence on this book. In an age of strict conventions, letters allowed people to write down their emotions and show their true character. Think of the tone of Lydia’s careless letters after she elopes with Mr. Wickham, or the impact that Mr. Darcy’s impassioned letter of explanation had on Elizabeth. This is the first time in the novel that we are treated exclusively to his voice and point of view, and her reaction (and the reader’s) is a powerful one.

This Pride and Prejudice reissue is full of features that teachers and students of fine literature will especially love. They are:

  • A Chronology of Jane Austen, which lists important events in Jane’s life against an historical backdrop.
  • A select bibliography. Thanks to Google reader, many of these references can be found online.
  • Two appendixes: One titled “Rank and Social Status”, the other simply titled “Dancing.”
  • Textual notes, which compare various printed editions
  • Explanatory notes. These annotations, though not as extensive as David Shapard’s, help to explain obscure customs and terms from days gone by.

The Jane Austen reissues by Oxford World’s Classics came out on June 15th. As far as my thrifty pocketbook is concerned, the price of this quality trade paperback novel is just right.

Click here for my review of Lady Susan:A vicious Jewel

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