“From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that ground-work of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

The shorter version would be stronger if she said, “You are the last man in the world I would ever marry”; however, the Elizabeth of the Real Reads version is still very emphatic in her refusal, just as the Elizabeth of Jennifer Adams’s Little Miss Austen: Pride and Prejudice is. In this twenty-page board book, Darcy asks, “Marry me?” and Elizabeth says, “No!”; Mr. Collins says, “We shall marry!” and Elizabeth replies, “No way!” — which I think is hilarious. (I’ve written about that book here). Of course Austen’s prose is to be preferred, but these other versions are fun to read with children, and — I’ll repeat the common argument about film adaptations of Austen’s novels — if they inspire readers to continue on to the novels themselves, then that’s a good thing.

I like the way the Real Reads P&P opens with illustrations and brief descriptions of the main characters: “Elizabeth is lively, clever and proud of her ability to judge other people. Is she right to dislike Mr Darcy, or has she made a terrible mistake?” The section at the back of the book, called “Taking Things Further,” does a great job of encouraging readers to turn to “the full novel in all its original splendour,” and of explaining what is lost in this abridged version. Not only does Tavner stress that “nothing can beat the original,” she also provides information about things that have been omitted, including more details about the marriages of Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins and of Lydia and Wickham. The book is clearly intended as an introduction to Austen’s novel, rather than simply as a substitute. There’s a section that recommends books and websites about Jane Austen’s life and works — to which I would have added Carol Shields’s short biography of Austen, and the Jane Austen Society of North America website. While Real Reads is published in the UK, and it would make sense for readers there to begin by joining the Jane Austen Society of the United Kingdom, there is a wealth of on-line information about Austen available from JASNA.

I can see why Gill Tavner has altered the dialogue in other places of this version of Pride and Prejudice as well, but I have to say that when I read the book to my four-year-old daughter, I sometimes substituted Austen’s own words. For example, I couldn’t bring myself to say, “She is quite pretty, but not pretty enough to tempt me,” instead of “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me.” Then I explained the meaning of “tolerable” and “handsome.” (Of course not every child will be reading the book with an adult, and that’s part of the point — older children can read this book on their own.) We talked about how this book is different from Austen’s novel, sort of in the same way that movies can be quite different from the books they’re based on. This question came up a lot last summer, when we were watching Kevin Sullivan’s Anne of Green Gables, and his cartoon episodes that are based on Anne’s story, but add new characters and new situations. My daughter loves the movies and cartoons, and is keen to know what’s from the book and what’s invented by others.

The Real Reads Pride and Prejudice opens with “The Proposal,” focusing, as a film might, on the central dramatic conflict right away. Austen’s famous “truth universally acknowledged” is replaced by the comparatively flat “Mr Darcy paced awkwardly around the room.” Ironically, while the proposal is a dramatic scene, its opening line as adapted here is not very compelling, whereas Austen’s brilliant opening sentence is one of the best-known, most-quoted lines in all of English literature. Yet it doesn’t take long before we’re brought back to what happened “Before the Proposal,” and we get a version of that line: “Like many mothers, Mrs. Bennet was firmly of the belief that any single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Happily, Tavner hasn’t changed it to something like “any rich single man must want a wife”; the second half of the sentence keeps Austen’s words. The book is simplified in the interest of introducing children or other readers intimidated by the length and style of Austen’s novel, but it is not “dumbed down.”

My daughter and I both really enjoyed the Real Reads Pride and Prejudice. It’s a very well-written introduction to the novel that highlights the drama of Darcy’s first proposal, and the choice to foreground the proposal gets at central questions right away: why does Elizabeth tell Darcy he’s the last man she would ever marry, and is she wrong about his character? Even though readers of this adaptation miss out on the intricacies of the reasons she dislikes him and of the way she comes to revise her thinking, they’ll still have a good sense of the central dilemma of the scene in which she says “No!” (Obstinate, headstrong girl. Good for her!)

After we read the book, my daughter said, “Mom, if I ever write a book, and they make it into a movie, and they want to change it, I’ll just tell them not to.” (Hmmm — I think she’s absorbing some of my prejudices….) We talked about some of the reasons why there are changes in movies and in books like this. She and I haven’t yet watched the 1995 and 2005 adaptations of Pride and Prejudice together, so maybe those are next. Or perhaps I’ll read her a chapter or two of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and see what she thinks. She loved Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea, and now we’re into Anne of the Island. Is it too big a leap from Anne to Austen?

Laurel Ann Nattress of Austenprose and Vic Sanborn of Jane Austen’s World reviewed Davies’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility in 2008, and both of them raise questions about changes and added scenes in the film. “Overall, this is nice stuff,” writes Nattress, “but why can’t these movie makers ever get it right? Is Austen to be forever edited, misinterpreted, misapplied, rewritten, and in this case sexed up?” The question of what constitutes a successful adaptation is complex and endlessly fascinating, as evidenced by these and other reviews, by the many books and articles on the topic, and by the many discussions among fans of Austen’s novels and fans of the films inspired by them.

You can find JASNA’s guide to Jane Austen on Film here: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that the book is always better than the movie, but what fun we have watching those movies!” The JASNA guide includes a list of on-line articles about film adaptations of Sense and Sensibility.

If you haven’t already seen Davies’s S&S, you might want to watch that one in the next couple of weeks, and perhaps also the 1995 Ang Lee/Emma Thompson S&S. As always, please let me know if you’d like to attend and I’ll send you directions.

Come and join the conversation with David on May 6th about adapting Austen — and/or leave your opinion here about what you think of the film adaptations of S&S, and about what you look for in adaptations of Austen’s novels. What do you think about the question of fidelity to Austen’s plot and dialogue — and to her satire? Do the films enrich your experience of Austen’s novels? What do you think of the addition of the sex scene that opens Davies’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility?

Is P.D. James channelling the spirit of Jane Austen, or has Death Comes to Pemberley received attention because of the powerful combination of Austen’s fame and James’s own fame, more than because of its literary merits? The critics are divided, and we want to know what you think.

Please join members of JASNA Nova Scotia on Sunday, April15th at 2pm for tea and a discussion of Death Comes to Pemberley. Let me know if you’re interested and I can send you directions. If you can’t make it (or even if you can), please feel free to comment here with your assessment of the novel.

Just as Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady learns of the intimacy between Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond when she sees Osmond seated and Madame Merle standing (at a time when a man who didn’t know a woman well would be standing if she were standing, and seated only if she were seated first), Owen Leath in The Reef discovers the intimacy between his fiancée Sophy Viner and George Darrow when he glimpses the two of them alone in the study. Owen’s mother Anna, who has hoped to marry Darrow, insists that it isn’t odd for “two people who are staying in the same house” to be “seen talking together — !” But the tell-tale fact, as Owen says, is that “They were not talking. That’s the point — .” Through the window, he says, he could see Darrow “sitting at my desk, with his face in his hands. She was standing in the window, looking away from him.” The scene is a turning point, as it is for Isabel, as it leads Owen to begin to watch his fiancée more closely.

There is a series of confrontations in The Reef as these characters try to determine what has happened and what will happen next. It’s a novel about difficult decisions, and about the difficulty of making any decision. Will the truth emerge, will Anna forgive Darrow, will she give him up? She must decide how to reconcile her future with her ideals. She has cherished honour as “her deepest sentiment,” but is obliged to consider now whether she will accept Darrow’s philosophy: “Life’s just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.” I find the confrontations, and the ambiguous ending of this novel, fascinating, and I would recommend The Reef to anyone who wants to explore more of Wharton’s novels in the year of her 150th birthday.

Jane Austen Fashion, by Penelope Byrde

At our JASNA Nova Scotia meeting this month, Lou Harrington will talk about how to make a Regency ball gown (or how to persuade someone to make one for you). You can read about Lou’s experience of the 2011 Jane Austen Festival in Bath here, or perhaps you read about it already and saw a picture of Lou in costume in JASNA News (Winter 2011, p.25).

The meeting is at 10:30 am on Saturday, March 17th, at Anita’s house, and will be followed by lunch and a fabric-shopping trip. Please let me know if you’re interested in attending and I can pass along directions.

I don’t have a Regency gown myself, but I know how to sew, and I do have a pattern for a girl’s Regency dress. It’s easy to put off sewing because usually I’d rather write or read than sew, but I expect Lou’s talk will inspire me to make a fancy dress for my daughter to wear at future JASNA meetings, or perhaps even at this year’s Regency Ball at the AGM in New York.

In 1921, Wharton wrote to Sinclair Lewis, thanking him for his letter of congratulation about the Pulitzer Prize she had just won for The Age of Innocence. She told him that “I had long since resigned myself to the idea that I was regarded by you all as the — say the Mrs. Humphry Ward of the Western Hemisphere; though at times I wondered why.”

Lewis had written to tell Wharton how much he admired her work, even though the Pulitzer jury’s choice of his own novel Main Street had been overruled by the trustees of Columbia University. The trustees had chosen The Age of Innocence instead, as worthy of the prize awarded “for the American novel which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” Wharton told Lewis that “when I discovered that I was being rewarded — by one of our leading Universities — for uplifting American morals, I confess I did despair.” Although she accepted the prize, she was uneasy about being designated the upholder of wholesome American virtues. She was reassured, she said, by Lewis’s letter, and she concluded by telling him that “if two or three of us are gathered together, I believe we can still save fiction in America.

Both Edith Wharton and Mary Ward were best-selling novelists whose writing was strongly influenced by tradition, and both preferred to argue for women’s capabilities more than for their rights. Henry James was friends with both of them — despite being suspicious or envious of their popular successes — and the two women were on friendly terms with each other, although they were never very close. In the summer of 1914, Wharton rented Ward’s country house Stocks, near Tring in Buckinghamshire. She spent very little time there because of the outbreak of war, but before she returned home to Paris, she stayed for a while in Ward’s house in London, in Grosvenor Place, while the Ward family returned to Stocks.

Wharton’s reputation as an important American novelist is secure, but Mary Ward is a contradictory character, and history is not sure what to do with her. Ward can’t be ignored entirely — she was one of the best-selling novelists, and one of the most energetic philanthropists, of the nineteenth century. Yet there has been no dramatic resurgence of interest in her, even in the decades since the publication of John Sutherland’s excellent biography, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian (1990). Reading Ward can be at times delightful and entertaining, at other times excessively didactic and irritating. Sometimes, however, difficult people are worth knowing.

Here’s a portrait of Mary Ward in 1889, when she was 38, one year after the publication of her most famous novel, Robert Elsmere:

"Mrs. Ward in 1889," from The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward (1923), by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

And here’s a portrait of Edith Wharton from 1905, when she was 43 and had just published the first of her best-known novels, The House of Mirth:

Both women adopt a conventional pose, but nevertheless, the similarity is striking.

In Wharton’s story “The Spark,” set in 1890’s New York but looking back to the 1860’s, there is a dinner party — a “man’s dinner,” it’s called — hosted by the narrator’s mother.  Several Civil War veterans are invited, and the narrator persuades his mother to invite his friend Hayley Delane because he wants to see if Delane will discuss his own experiences in the war with these men. It turns out later that Delane met the poet Walt Whitman during the war, and that in times of moral crisis Whitman’s voice prompts him to make unconventional choices. But at the dinner he does not speak of his experiences, unlike Major Detrancy, for example, who prefaces every statement with “When a fellow’s been through the war….” The narrator observes that in contrast to the other men, Delane “had gone on growing” morally, yet “intellectually they were all on a par.”

The example Wharton chooses to illustrate the lack of intellectual growth is a misunderstood reference to the novels of Mary Ward:

When the last new play at Wallack’s was discussed, or my mother tentatively alluded to the last new novel by the author of Robert Elsmere (it was her theory that, as long as the hostess was present at a man’s dinner, she should keep the talk at the highest level), Delane’s remarks were no more penetrating than his neighbours’ — and he was almost sure not to have read the novel.

Wharton avoids referring to Ward by name, but the reference to Robert Elsmere would have been easily recognizable to her readers, if not to her characters. As Sutherland says in his biography, Robert Elsmere was probably the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century.

If Mary Ward was the Dan Brown or the J.K. Rowling of her day, why don’t we know more about her now? One of the reasons has to be that popular novels come and go, but another reason is that Ward herself is not seen as likeable. Even in her own time, she had a reputation as a self-righteous, moralistic novelist, and the phrase “Virtue is its Humphry Ward” was coined by a member of the Queen’s Acre set, a group of friends — many of them also Wharton’s friends — who often gathered at the writer Howard Sturgis’s country house in Windsor, Berkshire.

In “The Spark,” as the narrator’s mother prepares to withdraw from the dinner and leave the men to their punch, one of the guests says, “Abandoning us to go back to Mr. Elsmere — we shall be jealous of the gentleman!”  If the narrator’s mother is reading Ward herself, however, it is not Robert Elsmere, but the “new novel,” which could be any of the five Ward published during the 1890’s: The History of David Grieve (1892), Marcella (1894), The Story of Bessie Costrell (1895), Sir George Tressady (1896), or Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898). The gentlemen whose lives were defined by their experience in the ’Sixties are not up to date on the literature of the ’Nineties, and Wharton, writing in the 1920’s, is gently mocking both the misunderstood reference to Robert Elsmere, and the intellectual pretensions of a woman who sees Mary Ward’s moralistic novels as the height of literary achievement.

By 1924, when “The Spark” appeared in Old New York, Mary Ward was out of date and laughable. She was one of those popular writers the world stopped reading as soon as she died, which was in 1920, at the age of 70. In addition to being popular, she was earnest in her desire to change the morality and even the religion of her readers. Robert Elsmere is a tale of religious controversy in which the marriage between the Church of England clergyman and his devout wife Catherine is strained when Elsmere becomes convinced that the new morality is to be found in a religion that accepts Jesus as a moral teacher, but denies the resurrection. Ward dramatized the shattering of traditional belief in a novel of ideas that was accessible to a large audience, and her nineteenth-century readers were fascinated by her unorthodox approach.

Although she was unconventional in her ideas about religion, Ward was self-righteously conventional in her ideas about politics, and in the early part of the twentieth century her literary reputation suffered as she began to resist and then to denounce the campaign for women’s suffrage. In 1908 she agreed to become the first president of the Anti-Suffrage League, and she edited the Anti-Suffrage Review and wrote several articles on the subject. Although Tolstoy had described her as “the greatest living English writer,” and many of her contemporaries had seen her as George Eliot’s natural successor, Ward didn’t change with the times in a new century, and was often mocked for her old-fashioned ideas and morality. Max Beerbohm, for example, nicknamed her “Ma Hump,” and caricatured her as standing in the shadow of her Uncle Matthew Arnold. She certainly did live in the shadows of her famous uncle and of her famous grandfather, Thomas Arnold.  After she published her first novel in 1884, Matthew Arnold said that “No Arnold can write a novel: if they could, I should have done it” — thereby slighting both Mary Ward and his brother William, who had published a novel thirty years previously.

Sutherland suggests that Ward’s desire for financial success led her later in her career to write inferior novels. The later distaste for her work probably also had to do with the repercussions of Lytton Strachey’s attitude toward her as a relic of the Eminent Victorians he criticized so vehemently in his 1918 book — Strachey’s attack on Thomas Arnold was in part inspired by his dislike of Mary Ward. George Gissing and Arnold Bennett also disliked Ward’s work, and Oscar Wilde said Robert Elsmere was “simply Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, with the literature left out.”

Like Wharton, Ward was something of a moralist and something of an iconoclast. Both women were powerful and energetic in their personal and professional lives, both were far more active and lively than their husbands, and both took charge of and ran large volunteer organizations — Ward on behalf of London’s working poor, Wharton on behalf of war-time refugees. In fact, Mary Ward’s legacy as an organizer of charities is in much better shape right now than her literary reputation. In 1890, Ward founded the Passmore Edwards Settlement, later renamed Mary Ward House, in London. The settlement seems to have been partly inspired by the more or less Unitarian community founded by her character Robert Elsmere. It offered play centres for children and fully-equipped classrooms for children with disabilities — both the first of their kind in London — and hosted lectures, concerts, and meetings of various clubs. The Mary Ward Centre in Bloomsbury is still an adult education centre. Ward was also instrumental in the founding of Somerville College and was supportive of education for women, despite her participation in the Anti-Suffrage League.

Wharton’s comparison of herself with Mary Ward, as perhaps “the Mrs. Humphry Ward of the Western Hemisphere,” is a suggestive one. It raises the question of how the novelist of manners can write about the values of the past and still be taken seriously in the present and into the future, it reminds us that novels about morals always risk moralizing, and it points to tensions having to do with the countries about which one moralizes. The quest “to save fiction in America” is both lighthearted and serious — Wharton recognizes that part of the problem of Ward’s reputation is that she was almost wholly serious. If Wharton was trying to save fiction in America, Ward had tried to save fiction (not to mention religion and education) in England, but the ethical goal of “saving fiction” is a problematic one, which Wharton realized, even if Ward did not see these problems as clearly. A number of Ward’s novels are well worth reading – Helbeck of Bannisdale in particular is reminiscent of George Eliot’s novels in its examination of religious convictions and controversy, Marcella explores the question of women’s suffrage, and despite its heavily didactic tone, Robert Elsmere is a fascinating story about a man struggling with his conscience.

For Further Reading:

Helbeck of Bannisdale, Marcella, and Robert Elsmere are available from Project Gutenberg.

Ashton, Rosemary. “Doubting Clerics: From James Anthony Froude to Robert Elsmere via George Eliot.” The Critical Spirit and the Will to Believe, ed. David Jasper and T.R. Wright. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.

Emsley, Sarah. “The Reputation of Mary Augusta Arnold (Mrs. Humphry) Ward.” Nineteenth-Century Feminisms 7 (2003): 53-64.

Gates, Barbara T. “Century’s End: The Coming Universal Wish Not to Live.” Chapter 8 in Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. London: Chatto & Windus, 2007.

Lewis, R.W.B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. London: Vintage, 1993.

Lewis, R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Macmillan, 1988.

Sutherland, John. Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwardian. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

Thompson, Nicola Diane. “Responding to the Woman Questions: Rereading Noncanonical Victorian Women Novelists.” Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question. Ed. Nicola Diane Thompson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Ward, Mary. Helbeck of Bannisdale. 1898. London: Penguin, 1983.

—. Marcella. 1894. Ed. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck and Nicole B. Meller. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002.

—. Robert Elsmere. London: Smith, Elder, 1888.

Wharton, Edith. “The Spark.” Old New York. 1924. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Today is Edith Wharton’s 150^th birthday, and I’m thinking about ways to celebrate, in addition to rereading her work. There’s a short birthday video on the website of The Mount, the house Wharton designed and built in the Berkshires; there are recent articles on her as a role-model for latter-day feminists, by Anita Brookner, and on rich American Wharton heroines who marry European aristocrats, by Pat Ryan; there is a New York Times slideshow that focuses on Wharton-related landmarks in New York City; and there’s a guest post at Austenprose by Lev Raphael, who remarks that when watching “Downton Abbey,” he feels as if he’s “living in an Edith Wharton novel. More than one, in fact.” Pat Ryan also analyzes connections between Wharton’s novels and the world of “Downton Abbey,” and says that Julian Fellowes, creator of the PBS miniseries, points to Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) as one of his influences.

The heroine of The Custom of the Country, my own favourite Wharton novel, is always in search of “something still better beyond,” something “more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her!” Disappointed with her early forays into society, Undine Spragg vows, “I’ll never try anything again till I try New York.” Disappointed with New York, she tries Europe, but no matter what combination of money and power she enjoys, even when she has “everything she wanted,” she still feels, “at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.”

Wharton satirizes Undine’s ambitions, but she also understood them. In a diary entry twenty years after the novel was published, she made a note about satisfaction: “Satisfied! What a beggary state! Who would be satisfied with being satisfied?” Late in her career she wrote, “As my work reaches its close I feel so sure that it is either nothing or more than they know. And I wonder, a little desolately, which?” Current critical opinion is quite certain that it is far more than “nothing.” Two of the highlights for me among recent books are Hermione Lee’s biography, Edith Wharton, and a volume of essays on The Custom of the Country, edited by Laura Rattray. There are lots of other even more recent books and articles on Wharton and her work, and many more birthday tributes on the web. I wonder if Wharton would be satisfied with the things we say and write about her? (And I wonder what she’d think of the way her photograph is animated in the video from The Mount, to make it look as if she’s blowing out the “150” candles?)

Come and join us to talk about “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” in Sense and Sensibility, along with other intriguing topics such as duels, portrait miniatures and hairwork, plots and “dark subplots,” iconography, letters, Emma Thompson’s film adaptation of the novel, connections between Frankenstein’s monster and the Dashwood sisters, and a defense of Edward Ferrars as a hero.  You can find the essays published in Persuasions On-Line 32.1 (2011) here.

Many thanks to Catherine Morley for her fascinating talk at Dalhousie about connections between the clear fluids recommended in hospitals today, and the beef tea, barley water, and gruel of Jane Austen’s time.

Chawton House Library Reading Room

Dr. Morley is currently researching the history of feeding practices in hospitals, and she spent a month in 2010 as a Visiting Fellow at Chawton House Library, where she studied cookery books from Austen’s time.  More information about her time in Chawton is available on her blog “Summer in Chawton.”  You can read her comments on what children ate in Austen’s time here.

We are delighted that Catherine moved to Nova Scotia from BC this year, so that we can welcome her as new member of JASNA Nova Scotia as well.  We’re looking forward to hearing about her research, and hope you can join us on January 6th.  Best wishes for a happy new year!

Edited to add the time of Catherine’s talk: 3:45 pm.  Thanks to the readers who reminded me.

At our house, we’re enjoying two new Advent calendars. One is an Eric Carle Christmas tree with ornaments, and the other is a row of little handmade bags with chocolates and maple candies inside–and a beautiful handmade book necklace (made by Terry Durnavich) in the last one. My daughter and I worked on the little bags together, inspired by the kind of sewing projects Amanda Blake Soule describes in Handmade Home. While there isn’t an Advent calendar project in the book, the way she incorporates children’s artwork into things like tablerunners and bookmarks made me think we could do something similar for Advent. My daughter has also drawn tiny pictures of people, including Baby Jesus, to go in the bags. We’ve used ribbon to tie the bags to a curtain rod that hangs in our kitchen, which we usually use to display my daughter’s paintings and drawings. We call it the “imagination bar,” and it, too, was inspired by Amanda Blake Soule.  Her earlier book The Creative Family suggests using a rod or wire to display an ever-changing collection of artwork along with other bits and pieces of things, such as autumn leaves, that inspire children to create new art.