Deborah Yaffe's Blog

Tomorrow is Mansfield Park’s two hundredth birthday, and what’s a birthday without a party? Our host is the writer and blogger Sarah Emsley, who has planned her blog’s celebration, ,” around a series of weekly guest posts by forty-two Janeites – bloggers, scholars, journalists and authors of Austen spinoff fiction.

Each post will comment on an excerpt from the novel, and the contributions will run in the order of the excerpts--starting tomorrow with Lyn Bennett, Dalhousie University English professor, on the novel’s opening paragraph. (My contribution, on an episode in Chapter 10, will run this summer.)

It’s going to be fascinating to discover everyone’s take on this most fascinating and complicated of Austen novels. I hope you’ll take Sarah up on her “Invitation to Mansfield Park” – what’s a party without lots of guests?

I’m looking forward to seeing Belle, the new movie about the real-life, mixed-race great-niece of Lord Mansfield, the eighteenth-century British judge who made important rulings about Britain’s involvement in the slave trade.

Apparently, the gods of film criticism have decreed that no story about Belle may see print unless it mentions Jane Austen, the touchstone for any female-centered costume drama set in the drawing rooms of Georgian England.

To be fair, the connection isn’t entirely tenuous: some literary critics speculate that Austen set her third novel at “Mansfield” Park in oblique reference to Lord Mansfield, because she wanted her readers to think about how the profits from slavery underpinned that leisured world.

In a story on the film, the New York Times claimed that “literary scholars” even believe Austen might have based Fanny Price on the real-life Belle.

I didn't remember hearing this before, though I freely admit I’m no literary scholar. But judging from the link the Times provided, the only person seeing a Fanny-Belle connection may be an unnamed member of JASNA’s Atlanta chapter. (The fact that the article also calls Fanny “the antislavery heroine of Mansfield Park”--a characterization that is, at the very least, highly debatable--doesn’t inspire confidence.)

Meanwhile, however, the movie has gotten excellent reviews. And of course I’m a sucker for any female-centered costume drama set in the drawing rooms of Georgian England. Since I’m, you know, a Jane Austen fan.

Some days you get that hopeless feeling – that sense that the mountain of ignorance is so high and so wide that you, chipping away with your tiny pick, can’t possibly make a dent in its vastness.

Days such as the one on which your “Jane Austen” Google alert brings you a gem like : a WikiAnswers question enquiring, “Is Jane Austen’s maiden name Eyre?”

As I write this, the question remains unanswered. Perhaps because a simple “no” hardly seems sufficient.

I spent my weekend in Janeite heaven: Saturday at “Jane Austen Day,” a delightful conference sponsored by the Eastern Pennsylvania chapter of JASNA, and Sunday at a meeting of my local (Central New Jersey) chapter of JASNA.

The topic for Sunday’s local meeting was Jane Austen spinoff fiction. We munched scones, chatted about our favorite – and not-so-favorite – examples of the genre, and speculated about why Jane Austen, alone among classic authors, has inspired such an outpouring of imitators. (Because her characters seem unusually real? Because her life is modest and relatable? Because she only wrote six books?)

Saturday’s more ambitious event featured three distinguished academics delivering papers on the conference topic, “The Unfinished Jane Austen” – the books, and the life, that Jane Austen left uncompleted.

Jocelyn Harris, retired from the University of Otago in New Zealand, spoke on card games as a metaphor for the marriage market in Austen’s novel fragment The Watsons. Janine Barchas of the University of Texas at Austin discussed Regency advertising and the concept of branding in relation to the unfinished Sanditon. And Michael Gamer of the University of Pennsylvania talked about how different posterity’s view of Austen might have been had she survived longer, and had her brother Henry not lived to cultivate an image of her as a sedate and pious spinster.

All three papers were well-delivered and thought-provoking, but as usual in these Janeite gatherings, I found myself enjoying the company as much as the program. What did you think of Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey, the latest installment in the Austen Project updates? Are you planning on attending this fall’s JASNA meeting in Montreal? Isn’t it bittersweet to realize how good Sanditon was going to be, if only Austen had lived to finish it? These gatherings are the place for these conversations, and a dozen more like them. It's all about community.

The quintessential Janeite moment came amid one of the scholarly lectures, as the speaker – surely by accident -- referred to Jane Austen’s untimely death at the age of “fifty-one.” A rustling whisper swept through the audience, as dozens of voices murmured a correction: “Forty-one.”

Squee! Only nine months late (but who’s counting?) my nine-disc, gazillion-hour edition of “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” finally arrived this week.

LBD, a witty and romantic web series that updated the story of Pride and Prejudice to twenty-something tech entrepreneurs in California, won tens of thousands of fans during its online run in 2012-13.

After an epic Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly eight times more than its $60,000 goal, LBD’s creators set out to produce a DVD package. Those of us who forked over a $55 pledge were told to expect our discs in July. Of 2013.

Judging from the apologetic updates that landed in my in-box with some regularity, turning dozens of hours of web content into a slickly packaged DVD is. . .more work than you’d expect.

But finally I’m the proud owner of all one hundred of LBD’s five-minute core episodes, plus assorted spinoffs and DVD extras. (I’ll skip the gag reels, but count me in for the inside scoop on the casting and the writing.)

Now all I need is a very long weekend. . .

Yet another goodie for Janeites to gaze at wistfully: a mid-week stay in Bath, England, in a building described as “Jane Austen's five-bedroomed luxury town house.”

And all you have to do to enter the drawing is drop off your business card at the booth of a sales-training firm during the May 15 Swindon Business Show. I can’t say my mid-May travel plans currently include Swindon, but perhaps yours do. (In which case I will mail you my business card, along with a small bribe. Er, fee.)

As Janeites will remember, Austen lived in a number of different places during her Bath years (1801-1806), and the raffle offer doesn’t specify which one is featured. But the briefest of Google searches makes clear that it’s Number 4 Sydney Place, where Austen, her parents, and her sister, Cassandra, lived from 1801 to 1804. (Yes, 1804. The plaque is wrong.)

No question that Number 4 was a far pleasanter place than the lodgings the financially pressed Austen women were forced into after the Rev. George Austen – and his pension -- died in 1805. But even at their best, the Austen family finances were modest. Number 4 was no “luxury town house” when Our Jane lived there.

But renovated with all mod cons – you can now get free WiFi in Jane Austen’s house – it’s become a $250-a-night perch that’s just a short walk from Bath’s major tourist attractions. Austen’s novels may be pearls of incomparable worth, but in real estate only one thing is priceless: location, location, location.

Maybe it’s just me, but when I clicked this link, which came to me via my “Jane Austen” Google alert, I laughed out loud:

See, I read the headline as “Jane Austen college boys,” which immediately brought to mind images of Regency-themed keggers, or twenty-something guys wearing embroidered waistcoats with their saggy jeans and backwards-facing baseball caps.

On further inspection, I realized that what’s being marketed here are boys’ sports uniforms for the new Jane Austen College in Norwich, England, a secondary school named after Our Jane.

Naturally, I believe that it’s about time such a thing existed – in fact, why don’t we have an American version? (“Because she was British?” the hecklers suggest. Oh. Right.) I love the idea of sports fans standing on the sidelines yelling, "Go, Janeites! Get that ball in goal!" And I’m rather charmed that the school’s logo seems to be a quill pen.

In fact, I’m so charmed that I’m seriously thinking of buying myself the Jane Austen College sweatshirt, in black with fetching red accents. I’ll wear it to the next Regency-themed kegger.

“Jane Austen said it best,” a blogger for the Christian Post asserts in a recent piece on Biblical approaches to friendship. " ‘There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.’ "

Sigh. Yes, Jane Austen wrote that passage (in Northanger Abbey), so I suppose there’s a sense in which she “said it.” But really those are the words of the shallow coquette Isabella Thorpe, whose idea of friendship involves manipulation, deceit and an eye well cocked for the main chance.

Jane Austen didn’t intend those lines for a Hallmark card or a souvenir fridge magnet, with a “Jane Austen” tag appended to ratify the Unimpeachable Virtue of the sentiment. Hello! She was making fun of people who publicly trumpet their unselfish devotion to those they love, rather than quietly demonstrating it through their actions.

In fact, it's hard to think of a fridge-worthy Wise Jane Austen Quote that, in context, doesn't have an ironic spin that might make an Austen reader think twice. Remember all the trouble the Bank of England got into last summer when it decided to put a Caroline Bingley quote on the forthcoming Jane Austen bank note?

Is it too much to ask that people bent on recruiting Jane Austen to the cause du jour actually READ HER BOOKS before quoting her? Yes, I suppose it is. . .

She’s a brilliant prose stylist, a peerless satirist, the creator of indelible characters. Yeah, yeah, but it turns out that the real reason to read Jane Austen is that it’ll help you win TV quiz shows.

A mere four months after Sarah Olson ran the “Stone Cold Jane Austen” category to beat a five-time champ on “Jeopardy!” comes the news that the team from Cambridge University’s Trinity College won the final of Britain’s venerable “University Challenge” quiz show in part because of – yes – team members’ “knowledge of the novels of Jane Austen.”

YouTube video of the showdown does not seem to be available, so it’s impossible to assess the difficulty of the questions. The Daily Telegraph’s reviewer says the only answer he got was “Jane Austen’s Emma,” which doesn’t make it sound as if this competition would have fazed your average Janeite.

Interestingly, all the members of both the winning Cambridge team and the losing Oxford squad were men – proof, in case any were needed, that even boys should read Austen.

Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald ran an engrossing interview this past weekend with Caroline Knight, a great-greatgreatgreatI'velostcount niece of Jane Austen.

Knight and her brother -- descendants of Austen’s brother Edward, who took the name Knight after he was adopted by wealthy cousins – grew up in Chawton House, the Elizabethan pile down the road from Chawton cottage. The cottage, which we now know as Jane Austen’s House Museum, is of course the place where Austen wrote or revised all her novels.

Knight, a business consultant who lives in Melbourne, is in the news right now because she’s launched a literacy charity (the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation, natch) and wants publicity for this good cause.

But for us Janeites – not to mention us “Downton Abbey” viewers – what’s fascinating is the glimpse she offers into the life of a once-wealthy British family living in a formerly luxurious mansion that was falling down around their ears. Even as her semi-aristocratic family opened village fetes and hosted pheasant shoots, her father mowed the great lawn himself because no one could afford a gardener.

"It was us keeping up appearances, if you like," Knight tells the newspaper. "Where we lived was magnificent and the sitting room, library and great hall was very grand. The kitchen was in a hell of a mess, the attic rooms and back rooms hadn't been touched for years. It was the peripherals of the house that needed repair, the roof, the structural work you couldn't see. I had no sense of the fact that the place was falling down slowly.''

A few years after the last family event in the Great House – Knight’s eighteenth-birthday celebration – the property was taken over by Silicon Valley multimillionaire Sandy Lerner, whose successful quest to restore the house and turn it into a center for the study of early English writing by women is chronicled in a chapter of Among the Janeites.

Knight has returned only twice, she told the interviewer, but against her better judgment, part of her still misses that life. ''Even at nineteen, intellectually I knew this house was unsustainable, something has got to happen to it,” she says. “But that doesn't stop the heart, does it?''