English literature Archives - Page 21 of 44

Oxford Book of Essays

July 29, 2014 by Roy Johnson

classics of the essay genre written in English 1700-2000

The Oxford Book of Essays is a compilation of short literary prose studies edited by John Gross of pieces written in English stretching from Francis Bacon in 1625 to Clive James in 1980. He admits in his introduction that it’s almost impossible to define the literary essay (as distinct from the academic essay). The essay has no set rules or even recognisable shape: it can take the form of a moral homily, a character sketch, a piece of travel writing, or even a book review. The only requirement (to paraphrase Henry James) is that it should be interesting.

The grand-father of the Renaissance essay is Michel de Montaigne – who is actually mentioned in Fancis Bacon’s earliest entry in this collection – a figure who almost ‘invented’ the modern discursive essay, which generally combines personal reflection, entertaining anecdote, and historical background reference.

Some of the best of the earliest essayists in this plump volume have a genius for casting their thoughts almost in the form of aphorisms. Thomas Browne for instance, in his essay On Dreams reflects ‘[Sleep] the brother of Death extracteth a third part of our lives’, going on to observe that ‘If some have swooned, they may also have died in dreams, since death is but a confirmed swooning’ (1650). And Swift is equally succinct in On Good Manners: ‘Pedantry is properly the overrating any kind of knowledge we pretend to’ (1714).

As a literary genre the essay came to its first maturity when an educated readership coincided with the establishment of a vigorous periodical press. This was during the heyday of the The Spectator and the Tatler edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

These journals also introduced the idea of a persona who made comments on coffee house gossip and social characters of the time . In the ‘Sir Roger de Coverley Papers’ Addison pushed the boundaries of the essay form towards narrative fiction. And he writes entertaining reflections on mortality and death couched in essays on the buildings at his disposal – Westminster Abbey and The Royal Exchange.

In general the pieces written around this golden era tend to be witty, satirical, and deeply engaged with contemporary events. They represent the forming of modern post-Renaissance consciousness – the Age of Enlightenment. Even James Boswell’s slightly self-regarding style cannot dampen the impact of his passionate tirade against militarism in On War, a piece occasioned by a visit to the Arsenal in Venice.

The form of the assay is certainly loose, but there always seems to be a danger of falling into triviality – as in William Hazlitt’s piece considering the affectations of Beau Brummell or Anthony Trollope’s Pooteresque railings against plumbers. But on the other hand there is no rule that says the essay must always be serious. Nevertheless, it is those essays and reviews that embrace a rigorous critical attitude which remain the most impressive.

G.K. Chesterton’s defense of ‘penny dreadfuls’ which predates George Orwell’s essay on ‘Boy’s Weeklies’ by forty years is one of these. Philip Larkin’s review of the work of the Opies on children’s street rhymes is impressive as it calls the whole concept of childhood into question. V.S. Naipaul takes a similar attitude, smashing the reputation of Christopher Columbus (real name Christobal Colon) into pieces. And the finest work in the collection is an impassioned study of the White Man and the Black Man in America written by James Baldwin when he was staying in a remote Swiss village.

In terms of selection and editing, John Gross does seem to be cheating somewhat by including ‘essays’ which have been created by shortening longer pieces of work (by writers such as Lord Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, and Matthew Arnold). This approach devalues the very notion of the essay as a genre and reduces its definition to any short example of prose. But Gross compensates by including some excellent pieces from later twentieth century writers we might not normally think of as essayists – proving that the genre is still alive and in very good health.

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John Gross (editor), The Oxford Book of Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.704, ISBN: 0199556555

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Pale Fire

February 5, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, and web links

Pale Fire (1962) is a bizarre and playful ‘novel’ from the master of literary inventiveness, Vladimir Nabokov. It was written at the same time that he was editing his scholarly translation of Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. What Pale Fire offers is a comic parody of the same enterprise. It is a novel comprised of a spoof academic introduction written by the editor, a long poem written by his neighbour which gives the novel its title, and then the editor’s elaborate commentary which purports to explain hidden meanings in the text. All the notes are cross referenced with a scholarly apparatus. He then even adds an index.

Pale Fire – critical commentary

Structure

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the novel is its successful parody of an academic study – complete with bibliographic introduction, cross references, a scholarly apparatus, critical commentary, and index. All of these are brought to bear on the central text – John Shade’s poem Pale Fire – which has absolutely nothing to do with the Boy’s Own adventure story into which it is embedded.

Moreover, as a self-proclaimed ‘editor’, Charles Kinbote is a comic failure in his enterprise. He not only completely fails to understand Shade’s poem; he gets lots of details wrong; he fails to spot things that are obvious; he can’t be bothered to follow up his own ‘researches’; and he sets up links in his commentaries which turn out to be non-sequiturs.

Nabokov also makes Kinbote quite laughable as a character. He misunderstands what is happening around him. He is insensitive to the reactions of the people he encounters. And he is given quasi-absurd opinions – such as his half-baked critique of Proust and A la recherche du temps perdues (which is incorrectly capitalised in the index).

The unreliable narrator

Nabokov was a master of fiction delivered by unreliable narrators. From his earliest works as a writer of short stories such as The Eye (1930) and Spring in Fialta (1936) he created narrators who recount events that the reader is invited to interpret otherwise. Some of these narrators tell lies or attempt to mislead the reader. They play a form of literary hide and seek in which they deliver information which does not seem quite consonant with the rest of the story – and we begin to doubt their judgement. It is a skilful manipulation of point of view on the author’s part, and an invitation to readers to ‘participate’ in creating the ‘true meaning’ of the story.

This literary device can sometimes be stretched over the length of a novel. Henry James used it in The Sacred Fount (1901). But it is usually confined to the short story or the novella – for good reasons. The most important reason is that once the reader has realised that information is coming from an unreliable source, dramatic tension in the tale is put at risk.

It should be immediately apparent to most intelligent readers of Pale Fire that the editor-narrator Kinbote is both unreliable and not who he claims to be. In the Foreward he relates that a certain ‘ferocious lady’ says to him ‘What’s more you are insane’. She is quite right, and most readers will have no trouble realising that his account of the King’s ‘escape’ from Zembla is his own (factitious) autobiography. Shortly afterwards, if not at the same time, they will realise that the whole story is the delusion of a madman.

The problem is that they will realise this quite quickly, when there is still considerable plot-commentary to be revealed – which dilutes the effectiveness of any dramatic tension that follows. To offset this weakness, Nabokov introduces a second plot element in the character of political gangster Jakob Gradus whose role is to pursue and assassinate King Charles.

This too turns out to be part of Kinbote’s delusion – for the man who shoots John Shade is not a foreign political assassin but an escapee from a lunatic asylum seeking to avenge himself on the man (Judge Goldsworth) who has sent him there.

Interpretation

It has to be said that the apparent levels of fictionality in the novel have thrown critics into all sorts of acrobatic interpretations. There are some who believe that the commentary to the poem was written by John Shade himself, and others who think the ghost of Hazel Shade is somehow involved.

Nabokov, as the author of all the mischievous hints and clues scattered throughout the book, muddies the water even further by introducing a character called Professor V. Botkin, whom he describes as ‘an American scholar of Russian descent’. This sends other commentators into analytic raptures, pointing to the fact that the name Botkin is merely Kinbote in reverse. Perhaps Kinbote is the alter-ego of Botkin – or the other way round?

But the multiple levels of fictionality are apparent rather than real. Kinbote is clearly a fictional character, created by the author Vladimir Nabokov. Kinbote is operating as a teacher in a fictional (but credible) American university called Wordsmith College in the Appalachians. Kinbote claims to be the exiled king of a not-so-credible country called Zembla – and his escape from it is related via cardboard and comic operetta sequence of events. He is clearly delusional and his tale is a fantasy-invention. Interpretation of the novel is much simpler than its complicated story.

We know that Nabokov ‘lost his kingdom’ and had to flee Russia following the revolution; we know that he eventually emigrated to America; we know that he taught at a provincial college (Wellesley College) and wrote about the experience in other fictional productions (such as Pnin). We know that Nabokov had been translating and editing a scholarly version of Eugene Onegin – which comprised an introduction, the text of Pushkin’s poem/novel, and two volumes of commentary plus an index.

Pale Fire is nothing more than a literary spoof which re-mixes these biographical elements to offer a playful charade, a jeu d’esprit that is laced with the sorts of in-house jokes, narrative tricks, and literary spasms (wordplay, neologisms, and obsessive alliteration) that mark his later works following the high point of Lolita in 1955.

Extras

It should be clear from a few pages into the novel and everything following that Kinbote is a homosexual. What is not clear is why Nabokov should add this characteristic to his protagonist. The repeated and coy references to young boys and ‘manly behaviour’ become quite irritating – mainly because they are not in any way connected to the rest of the narrative. They eventually assume a sort of schoolboy smuttiness and reinforce other silly elements of the plot.

Pale Fire – study resources

Pale Fire – Penguin – Amazon UK

Pale Fire – Penguin – Amazon US

Pale Fire – Library of America – Amazon UK

Pale Fire – Library of America – Amazon US

Nabokov’s Pale Fire – Princeton – Amazon UK

Celestial Keys to Pale Fire – Sputnik – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire – plot summary

Foreward

The ‘editor’ Charles Kinbote presents a scholarly description giving the provenance of John Shade’s poem Pale Fire. He details the rivalries surrounding ownership and publication of the manuscript. He meets Shade and his wife Sybil when he becomes their next door neighbour whilst teaching at the same institution – Wordsmith College. Kinbote is a figure of fun at the college, and is clearly a homosexual.

Pale Fire

The poem in four cantos is an autobiographical meditation on Shade’s domestic life and his reflections on the borderlines between life and death. His parents die when he is young, and he is raised by his aunt Maude. He loses his religious belief, but searches for a meaning in life and wonders about the possibilities of life beyond the grave.

He meets his wife Sybil at high school, and still loves her forty years later. They have a daughter Hazel who is solitary, dyslexic and unattractive. She goes out with friends as a teenager and is shunned by the group. She pretends to go home, but drowns herself in an icy lake.

Shade meditates on life as a preparation for what will happen after death and the possibilities of reincarnation. He wonders who we might meet in the afterlife. Sybil thinks she receives signals from their dead daughter. After giving a lecture one evening Shade has a minor heart attack and a ‘vision’ of being briefly ‘dead’, when he sees the image of a white fountain. When he reads of a woman who has had the same experience he goes to interview her – but she thinks it is a social call. Nevertheless, he feels he has discovered some hidden pattern in life which gives it meaning.

He reflects on the difficulties of poetic composition and describes shaving whilst in the bath. He thinks about his wife, his dead daughter, and the books of poetry he has written. Finally he finds some comfort in his appreciation of the everyday life that surrounds him.

Commentary

Charles Kinbote examines the poem in close detail and explains meanings hidden in the text. He has forcibly befriended his neighbour the American poet John Shade and recounted to him the amazing story of King Charles II’s escape from a revolution in Zembla. Kinbote hopes that Shade will re-tell this story in a long poem on which he is currently working.

Kinbote’s story is that when a revolution occurs in Zembla, the king is imprisoned in his castle, from which he escapes via a secret passageway. He travels over mountains and eventually reaches the seashore. Zembla is divided politically into supporters of the king (Karlists) and their rival Extremists, including would-be regicides (the Shadows) who elect Jakob Gradus as their assassin.

The king is eventually parachuted into the USA where his friend Sylvia arranges for him to teach at Wordsmith College. He rents a house from Judge Goldsworth, next door to John Shade and his wife Sybil. Although he has only been there a short time, he claims to be close friends with Shade – though it is quite clear that these feelings are not reciprocated.

Kinbote spies on Shade day and night, whilst Sybil makes transparent excuses to protect her husband’s privacy by keeping Kinbote away from the house. Meanwhile the stupid and incompetent Gradus is making his way across northern Europe in search of King Charles. Gradus fails at every point, until he is eventually instructed to go to America.

Kinbote is saving a big surprise for John Shade when he completes his poem. It is quite clear that this is the revelation that he is King Charles. But on the very day the poem is finished and Kinbote has invited Shade for a celebratory drink, Gradus arrives and bungles the assassination, killing Shade in error.

Believing that Kinbote tried to protect Shade from the assassin, Sybil gives him the right to be the poem’s official editor. Gradus turns out to be an escaped lunatic who has gone to kill the person who sentenced him to an asylum – Judge Goldsworth, Kinbote’s landlord. Gradus subsequently commits suicide in jail.

Kinbote confiscates the manuscript of Pale Fire and at first is horrified to realise that it contains no mention of his escape from Zembla. Later he convinces himself that Shade has cleverly hidden the account in minor details of the poem – and so his commentary is designed to squeeze meaning out where none exists.

Pale Fire – principal characters

Charles Kinbote	the deposed King Charles II of Zembla
John Shade	an American poet and college teacher
Sybil Shade	his protective wife
Hazel Shade	their teenage daughter who commits suicide
Jakob Gradus	aka Jack Grey a bungling criminal and lunatic
Judge Goldsworth	the absent owner of Kinbote’s rented house

More on Vladimir Nabokov
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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Paste

April 23, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Paste first appeared in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly in December 1899. It was then reprinted in the collection of tales The Soft Side published by Methuen in 1900.

The Necklace

Paste – critical commentary

Historical background

The crux of this story is based on a social factor which might seem rather obscure in the twenty-first century. It’s the fact that actresses (and any women associated with the stage) were regarded from the Renaissance right up to the twentieth century as synonymous with loose morals and even prostitution.

It was very common for upper class males (and even royalty) to have mistresses who were singers or actresses. These women were either set up in premises or showered with gifts by their suitors – who were often described in euphemistic terms such as ‘protector’ or ‘admirer’.

It was a form of prostitution – and was tolerated because it did not threaten the established order. The procuring male bought the sexual favours of the female, and his place in society as either a bachelor or a man who had married within his own class remained unthreatened.

Why was it the stage rather than other occupations which should have given rise to this practice? Presumably because as singers or performers, the women would be more socially mobile, and would operate in a zone which was close to but not part of polite society.

The occupation of singer or actress was regarded as declasse. Arthur’s father (as a vicar) has courted social danger in marrying an actress, and the explanation for Arthur’s priggishness (and lies) is that he wishes to protect his family’s (and his own) reputation.

Literary tradition

This story is a variation on a tale made famous by Guy de Maupassant in 1884 called The Necklace (La Parure). Henry James was a personal friend of Maupassant, and wrote a critical study of his work in French Writers.

In Maupassant’s story a socially ambitious married woman borrows a diamond necklace to attend a grand public event. She loses the necklace and is forced to replace it, putting herself and husband in crippling debt. It takes them more than ten years of privation to repay the loan – at which point she discovers that the diamonds were only fakes, worth next to nothing.

The same theme was given a further twist by Somerset Maugham in his story A String of Beads (1927). In this version a young governess appears at a dinner party wearing a string of pearls which a fellow guest says are real and worth a small fortune. She says she paid fifteen shillings for them in a department store. Then two representatives from the store arrive and explain that she has been given the wrong pearls by mistake. They present her with three hundred pounds as compensation – which she lavishes on an expensive holiday in Deauville, mixing with rich men. She eventually becomes a courtesan, living in high style in Paris.

This story was itself a second variation on this theme, to which Maugham makes inter-textual reference. In Mr Know-All a young woman appears at dinner on a cruise ship wearing a set of pearls. A rather annoying guest claims he knows all about pearls and that they are worth a lot of money. The woman’s husband says she bought them for eighteen dollars. The two men have a one hundred dollar bet on who is right. But then Mr Know-All, seeing the woman’s discomfort, suddenly backs down, realising they must have been a gift from another man, presumably her lover. Next day she returns to him the one hundred dollars he gallantly forfeited to her husband.

Paste – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

Paste – HTML version at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Paste – plot summary

Arthur Prime’s father and stepmother die within two weeks of each other. Mr Prime senior was a vicar, and his second wife was a former actress. Arthur’s cousin Charlotte is presented with a box of her old theatrical costume jewellery as a memento of her aunt. Arthur and Charlotte wonder if some of the items might be real rather than fake, and if they turn out to be real, were possibly a present from an admirer. But Arthur priggishly denies this suggestion, claiming that his stepmother’s reputation was above reproach.

When a party is being organised by Charlotte’s employer, her associate Mrs Guy borrows the jewellery for a tableau vivant and reveals that a string of pearls are real, not fake. Charlotte thinks she is obliged to return them, but realises that to do so would reveal to Arthur their origin as a ‘gift’ from an actress’s ‘admirer’.

Mrs Guy wears the pearls to dinner and they are much admired. She even offers to buy them. Charlotte still thinks she ought to return them, but starts wearing them in private. Some months later she confronts Arthur with the truth about the pearls. He refuses to believe that they are real, and says he will seek a professional opinion.

He later writes to Charlotte telling her that the pearls are fake, but Charlotte meets Mrs Guy wearing them. She has bought them in Bond Street from a jeweller. Charlotte knows that Arthur has lied, but she also wonders if Mrs Guy has bought them directly from Arthur, since she knew his address.

Principal characters

Arthur Prime	a prissy young man
Charlotte Prime	his cousin, a governess
Mrs Guy	a social events organiser

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict and authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

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Philip Larkin biography

September 10, 2014 by Roy Johnson

his life, and a critical re-assesment of his major poetry

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love is the latest biographical study of arguably Britain’s most popular twentieth century poet. In his Introduction, respected and prolific Larkin scholar James Booth clearly sets out his position and concerns. Philip Larkin he believes is ‘by common consent, the best-loved British poet of the last hundred years’. But three decades after his death, he ‘remains a controversial figure, both as a poet and a man’. Ironically, his posthumous reputation was inadvertently tarnished by his two literary executors. Anthony Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) (properly) included his ribald and Chaucerian correspondence with like-minded friends, notably Kingsley Amis. The self-appointed literary guardians of public morality were quick to pounce, accusing him of racism, sexism, Thatcherism, misogyny and homophobia.

Andrew Motion’s official biography, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993), despite its impressive research, was also disapproving of his alleged character traits and proclivities. More recent ‘Larkin Studies’ have been (to borrow a Larkinian phrase) more precious than valuable, subjecting him to arcane post-modern analysis and exegesis. But the publication of Archie Burnett’s Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (2012), with its meticulous ‘Commentary’ on the provenance of his verse, has done a lot to restore a Larkin-centred appreciation of his poetic oeuvre.

James Booth now convincingly and gracefully rehabilitates Larkin (whatever his real or imagined personal ‘failings’) as a poet of the people: ‘Phrases and lines from his poems are more frequently quoted than those of any other poet of his time’. ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three’; ‘What are days for?’; ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’; ‘What will survive of us is love.’ Booth argues that ‘For the moment he seems to have had the last poetic word on love, on death, on the Great War, on parents, on ageing, on hedgehogs.’

Booth also suggests that Larkin’s poems feature the most uncompromising reflections on death outside the soliloquies of Shakespeare. With a veiled reference to Larkin’s sanctimonious detractors, he cautions that ‘there is no requirement that a poet should be likeable or virtuous’, but adds that all of his former friends and colleagues remember Larkin as a compassionate, courteous and extremely funny person, certainly not the morose ‘Hermit of Hull’. He was, Booth contends persuasively, ‘an ebullient provocateur with an instinct to entertain’, and ‘the various ideological Larkins who raise the passions of some critics, are provisional personae’. Like other human (and humane) beings, Larkin presented different faces to different people. His epistolary and hilarious ‘obscenities’ to Kingsley Amis, for example, were not retailed to Barbara Pym.

Booth deftly traces Larkin’s early years in Coventry and his relations with his parents, Sidney and Eva. As is well known, Sidney, City Treasurer of Coventry, was a declared admirer of Hitler and the Third Reich. Booth asserts that his father’s political views served only to turn his son away from embracing any coherent political ideology. In fact, his vague political sympathies veered more to the left than to the right, and many of his later poems first appeared in journals like the New Statesman.

On the other hand, Larkin père encouraged his son’s early passion for jazz, and also provided the family home with a decidedly ‘modern’ library: Hardy, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. But his parents’ obviously unhappy union did instil in the young Philip a life-long fear of marriage – or ‘misogamy’. The lacklustre Eva, although castigated in some of Larkin’s published letters, was to be the recipient of thousands of tender (and as yet unpublished) notes and letters from him for the remainder of her long life.

His years at Oxford introduced Larkin to Kingsley Amis and a circle of friends who made jazz their secular religion. Following his war-time job as a librarian in Wellington, where he met his first love, Ruth Bowman, Larkin went to the University College of Leicester and encountered the formidable and voluble Monica Jones. She was to remain his increasingly embittered partner until his death in 1985.

After a happy spell at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he had a brief sexual liaison with Patsy Strang, daughter of a South-African diamond-mining magnate, Larkin moved to the University of Hull, and embarked on affairs with the shy (and devoutly Roman Catholic) Maeve Brennan, and in the 1970s a much happier one with his common-sense and attractively mature secretary, Betty Mackereth. Larkin’s love life receives sensitive but also critical treatment from Booth. None of these women were his intellectual equals, but each, successively, became his poetic muse. No one (apart from Larkin himself) has written more insightfully about these complicated relationships.

However, perhaps the greatest strength of the book is Booth’s analyses of Larkin’s major (and minor) poems. A few examples must suffice. A Study of Reading Habits is a didactic warning against subliterary escapism. But there is an oblique subtext of self-mockery. Now, his status safely established, he ensures that one of his most quotable lines will be: ‘Books are a load of crap’.

In Church Going ‘The Church represents a moribund authority to which the poet sulkily refuses to defer. [But] his tone allows his pious readers to imagine that the poet himself shares their superstitious self-deception.’ He argues that The Whitsun Weddings, as the train journey unfolds, ‘becomes an Ode to Incipience.’ And on the notorious This Be The Verse Booth comments: ‘This must bid fair to be the funniest serious English poem of the twentieth century’ [and] must also already rival Gray’s “Elegy” in the number of parodies and pastiches it has generated.’

Larkin once said ‘I like to think of myself as a funny man’. A minor criticism of Booth’s book is that more space could have been given to Larkin the wit – and less, perhaps, to his early experiments with decidedly soft porn, as revealed in Trouble at Willow Gables, written under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman. Booth sees them as ‘high camp comedy’. Not all readers would agree.

He is on firmer ground with such Larkinesque bons mots as: sexual intercourse is ‘like asking someone else to blow your nose for you’, and [to Barbara Pym] ‘On Tuesday I have to address the freshers on “books” (“How to Kill, Skin & Stuff Them’). Or [to Kingsley Amis] after Larkin had declined the Poet Laureateship which was then accepted by Ted Hughes: ‘The thought of being the cause of Ted’s being buried in Westminster Abbey is hard to live with.’ The Selected Letters, and his poems offer many other revealing and ludic examples of Larkin the ‘funny man’.

Elsewhere, Booth offers nuanced interpretations of Larkin’s infamous assault on ‘modernism’ in the arts in general and jazz in particular, evaluates his two completed and published novels [Jill and A Girl in Winter], and points out that much of his poetry reflects ‘the twelve-bar blues formula’ so that a reader ‘plays’ a Larkin poem just as one might ‘play’ a recording of Bessie Smith or of Louis Armstrong (his great hero).

Booth also relates Larkin’s awareness of and empathy with the plight of African-Americans, and his increasing deafness – as well as his love of animals and, not least, his professional achievements as Librarian at the University of Hull. We are reminded that Larkin is probably unique among twentieth-century poets in writing in Toads in a `natural, first-hand way about work in the sense of paid employment. No other significant poet, except Wallace Stevens, held down a nine-to-five job with no expectation of becoming a `full-time’ professional writer.’

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love is the best biography we have or are likely to have for a long time – until possibly the eventual release of hundreds, if not thousands, of his currently embargoed letters. Even these are unlikely to contradict Booth’s apt conclusion: ‘What will survive of him is poetry. But the thought of his literary afterlife was never any consolation to him.’

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James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp.544, ISBN: 1408851660

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Philip Larkin letters

October 5, 2014 by Roy Johnson

witty, erudite, and scurrilous correspondence

Philip Larkin was very much a glass half empty sort of person. Even when things were going reasonably well in his life, he would find a reason to look on the glum side. He satirically called himself ‘the Hermit of Hull’ and generally moaned about everything – the weather, his neighbours, the state of his health, and even the plebeian food he chose to consume. Yet in his heyday he had three lovers at the same time; public honours and popular success were showered on him as a poet, and he even had more money than he knew how to spend. Yet despite the persistent gloominess, these letters also reveal that he could be entertainingly irreverent and very funny indeed.

The editor Anthony Thwaite is at pains to point out that this is only a selection from Larkin’s complete correspondence – and it is so selective that there’s a potential danger of creating a lopsided picture of the man himself.

For instance the figure of Monica Jones hovers in the background of many letters, but there are very few addressed to the woman herself – she who played such a significant role in Larkin’s erotic and intellectual life. (There is a separate collection – Letters to Monica.) However, the few which are reproduced make very uncomfortable reading. In one Larkin gives an ‘honest’ but excruciatingly self-centred account of a weekend visit from a former lover (Patsy Strang) which verges on the sadistic – written to a woman who devoted her emotional life to him.

Of course the letters also reveal what were considered inappropriate character traits when they were first published – his penchant for soft pornography, his tendency to smut and behind-the-bike-sheds swearing – particularly in his correspondence with Kingsley Amis. But it’s worth bearing in mind both the stifling mediocrity of much British culture in these post-war years, against which these attitudes were a healthy antidote, and the fact that a fellow son of the midlands (Joe Orton) was revving up by writing in exactly the same manner a few miles down the road.

What underlies a great deal of the correspondence from a sociological point of view is that once having established himself at Oxford there is ever afterwards a network of relationships, employment, and social connections which has the British university system at its core. It emphasises Oxbridge as a system which provides a three year membership that lasts a lifetime.

Yet despite his persistent gloom and claims of being neglected, he was well connected with Faber & Faber, the BBC, and prestigious journals such as The Spectator, The Listener, and New Statesman. But to do him credit, a great deal of his early work was published by small independent presses by whom he sometimes wasn’t even paid.

The year 1955 appears to have been something of an annus mirabilis for him – first a series of publications edited by admirers such as Robert Conquest and D.J.Enright which were followed by good reviews. Then there was the move to Hull. His first impressions were not very favourable: ‘It’s a frightful dump … The village smells of chips. The town smells of fish … Life here varies from dreary to scarcely-bearable’. Yet in the end it turned out to suit him well enough (‘It’s very nice & flat for cycling’) though his regard for the University might have shocked his colleagues had they known at the time:

But in the main this institution totters along, a cloister of mediocrities isolated by the bleak reaches of the East Riding, doomed to remain a small cottage-university of arts-and-science while the rest of the world zooms into the Age of Technology. The corn waves, the sun shines on faded dusty streets, the level-crossings clank, bills are made out for 1957 under billheads designed in 1926, and the adjacent water shifts and glitters, hinting at Scandinavia … That’s a nice piece of evocation for you.

He also had no time for the business of ‘lit crit’ and the pampered existence in university academic departments. Commenting in a letter to Barbara Pym he observes: ‘If you were in university life you would be familiar with the phrase ‘crushing teaching load’ — i.e. six hours a week six months a year’.

In terms of literary development it’s interesting to note that he started in the realm of fiction, and even produced two novels – Jill and A Girl in Winter – before disenchantment set in following an unfinished sand abandoned third and fourth novel. He then settled to poetry alone, which seemed better suited to his temperament.

Yet before he had even reached the age of forty he was writing: ‘I really have no sense of the future now, except as the approach of death’ and on reaching fifty he thought it was a miracle he was still alive. As if to confirm his own sense of the sands running out, he produced less and less poetry as he got older, and yet perversely devoted huge amounts of time and effort into compiling the badly-received Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (which he referred to satirically as ‘really the Oxford Book of Nineteen & Half Century’s Right-Wing Animal-Lovers Verse.

Even though he was writing in a number of different linguistic registers to people who reflect quite distinct relationships in his life – friends, lovers, publishers, public figures – he had an amazing gift for throwing off witty epigrammatic statements:

I don’t think I write well — just better than anyone else

Personally I should need only 2 words to describe English poetry since 1960 — ‘horse-shit’

I should like to change my address in Who’s Who from ‘c/o The University of Hull’ to ‘c/o Faber & Faber , 3 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AU’, and I hope this will be acceptable to you. My reason is to make it even more difficult for people to get at me.

This attitude even extends into the darker areas of his life. After travelling regularly at weekends for years to the nursing home in Leicester where his mother was confined, he mentions to a friend:

My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going blind. That’s what you get for not dying, you see.

He was fiercely loyal to old friends such as Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Thwaite; he helped other writers notably Barbara Pym and his old school friend Colin Gunner locate publishers; and he was amazingly diligent, well-informed, and persistent over the rights of published writers to their royalty entitlements and re-publication fees. He even registered himself for VAT when it was introduced.

In many respects he was a figure of contradictions – which these entertaining letters bring out very well. He was the recluse who (within the UK) traveled widely and socialised regularly; the confirmed bachelor who maintained sexual relationships with a number of women – often at the same time; the radical anti-establishment figure who accepted public honours by the bucketload; the prolific writer who produced only a handful of well-known poems; and the anti-materialist who was much-depicted with an old-fashioned bicycle but who actually drove a four litre Rolls Royce Vanden Plas.

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Anthony Thwaite (ed), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985, London: Faber & Faber, 1993, pp.791, ISBN: 057117048X

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Phyllis and Rosamond

March 22, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Phyllis and Rosamond (1906) is of particular interest because it is Virginia Woolf’s first short story. She had begun to write book reviews and essays two years earlier, and some elements of the exploratory essay and the intellectual study are present here: indeed, she would continue to blend philosophic reflections with narrative fiction throughout the rest of her career. The story was written in June 1906 and was never published in her own lifetime.

Virginia Woolf

Phyllis and Rosamond – critical commentary

The short story

Virginia Woolf began her writing life in the shadow of her father Sir Leslie Stephen, a famous nineteenth century essayist and biographer. Even her own first writings were essays and reviews, and it is interesting to note that she often blends other genres with that of the short story.

Phyllis and Rosamond begins in the mode of a discursive essay before it settles into any sort of dramatised narrative.

Let each man, I heard it said the other day, write down the details of a day’s work; posterity will be as glad of the catalogue as we should be if we had such a record of how the doorkeeper at the Globe, and the man who kept the Park gates passed Saturday March 18th in the year of our Lord 1568.

This is an approach to the short story she would often repeat – an idea or an observation of a quasi-philosophic nature, which is then illustrated by the story that follows.

And the story itself has very little drama, plot, or even suspense. It is an account of the tension between the imaginative nature of the two sisters and the stifling social conditions in which they find themselves. We are simply invited to contemplate their dilemma.

Woolf is picking up the baton of earlier writers of short stories – Maupassant and Chekhov (who she had read) – and continuing their narrative strategies of minimising overt drama in favour of a more contemplative and poetic juxtaposition of significant detail.

Themes

It is interesting to note that in this, the first of her many experimental short stories, Woolf flags up a number of the important large scale issues which were to emerge more fully developed in her later works – particularly studies such as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Her consciousness of history, her interest in biography, and her perception of women’s role in society are all foregrounded in the very first paragraphs of this story.

And as such portraits as we have are almost inevitably of the male sex, who strut more prominently across the stage, it seems worth while to take as model one of those many women who cluster in the shade. For a study of history and biography convinces any right minded person that these obscure figures occupy a place not unlike that of the showman’s hand in the dance of the marionettes;

Woolf’s argument is that the lives of women such as Phyllis and Rosamond are worth recording, even though they are trapped in a lifeless stasis, waiting to become married. In fact she is arguing that this quasi-tragic waste of spirit and imagination is worth recording just because it is so common, so typical, and yet unrecorded.

The story conveys an acute sense of the intellectual and cultural stimulation Phyllis finds in the free-ranging discussion (which is not dramatised) compared with the boring rituals of her home life. Radical ideas are expressed, religious belief is challenged, and dangerous topics such as love and marriage are frankly explored.

This is a fictionalisation of the experiences which had led Virginia Woolf (and her sister Vanessa) to depart their Victorian home in Kensington two years before, and de-camp to what was seen at the time as the bohemian milieu of Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

It is interesting to note that although she had made that cultural transition in her own personal life, she chose to fictionalise the more typical experience of women who were unable to make the transition.

It is a common case, because after all there are many young women, born of well-to-do, respectable, official parents; and they must all meet much the same problems, and there can be, unfortunately, but little variety in the answers they make.

Phyllis and Rosamund – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Phyllis and Rosamond – story synopsis

Phyllis and Rosamond are two daughters of a prominent civil servant Sir William Hibbert and his wife Lady Hibbert. They live in the centre of London and are ‘daughters at home’. That is, they have no occupation or career of any kind, and can expect no change in life except to be married, which their mother is very eager should happen.

The story lists the suffocating ritual of everyday upper class life, from breakfast to bedtime, a period which is only punctuated by their mother giving them petty domestic jobs to perform. They draw comfort from each other in their shared sense of oppression and the few private moments during which they can share ideas.

Their father brings work colleagues home to lunch, an occasion which is an empty ritual during which Phyllis is expected to make meaningful contact with Mr Middleton, who is being cast as a potential suitor. The two sisters agree that the man has no imagination or intelligence at all.

Later in the day they make social calls with their mother – leaving visiting cards at other people’s houses in the hope of being invited there. Then tea at six o’clock is followed by dinner at eight.

Finally Phyllis escapes to join her sister at the Tristrams, who live in a ‘distant and unfashionable’ part of the city – Bloomsbury. The group of people assembled there are free-thinking radicals who are discussing ideas. Phyllis has a disturbing experience of tension. She is excited by the intellectual atmosphere but conscious of herself as looking like something from a Romney painting.

The group discuss art and even love and marriage. Phyllis thinks herself inadequate in this heady environment, and feels that it is almost impossible to enter a world where people can choose freely who they might love. The hostess Sylvia Tristram tries to engage the sisters, but Phyllis feels that she cannot be at ease either at home or in such a bohemian milieu, concluding wistfully that ‘We might have been something better’.

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator of the story
Sir William Hibbert	a senior civil servant
Lady Hibbert	his wife
Phyllis Hibbert	one of their daughters (28)
Rosamond Hibbert	her younger sister (24)
Mr Middleton	Sir William’s secretary, suitor to Phyllis
Sylvia Tristram	a Bloomsbury hostess

Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Between the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.
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The Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

Point of View

February 19, 2015 by Roy Johnson

the perspective of authors, narrators, and characters

Point of view – what is it?

An important part of analysing fictional narratives is to take into account the point of view from which a story is being told. Point of view is the manner or perspective from which events and characters are seen or being depicted. The term should not be confused with its everyday meaning of ‘a personal opinion’.

The point of view can be created and controlled in a number of different ways. For instance, by –

the author’s attitude towards the events and characters – which could be comic, serious, or satirical
the attitude of a narrator towards the events and characters being described
the perspective of characters as they participate in the events of the narrative

Point of view – the author

A typical example of authorial point of view is the well-known ironic and witty opening of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). She is poking gentle fun at her characters in a mild satirical manner:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

This way of seeing things influences very strongly the way in which readers are likely to understand the novel. It would be difficult almost to the point of impossibility to see Pride and Prejudice as anything other than a comedy of manners. So the point of view is a powerful factor in our understanding and interpretation of this narrative.

This example is an authorial point of view because Austen has chosen a traditional third person omniscient narrative mode. Readers can be confident that such remarks reflect the author’s own attitudes to characters and events – because she does not create any distancing effects between herself as author and herself as omniscient narrator. Direct authorial comment giving a point of view is sometimes referred to as ‘authorial generalisation’.

Point of view – the narrator

This occurs when the author creates a separate character to tell the story – who is called the narrator. And the narrator can be objective, biased, or even unreliable in relaying information, depending on how the author wishes to affect the reader. The narrator may or may not be an active participant in the events of the narrative. The important thing to keep in mind is that the author and the narrator are not necessarily one and the same.

Fyodor Dostoyevski chose the first person narrative mode for his novella Notes from Underground (1864). The protagonist and narrator is a fictional character who is not even given a name, and whose ‘story’ is a long tirade against society and even against himself:

I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite.

Dostoyevski is now seen as one of the precursors of the movement in philosophy known as existentialism, and this novella is an exploration of an individual who is stripping away all comforting ideas and exposing his personal inner-demons in an age which is losing the reassurance of religious belief.

The importance of point of view in this case is that the reader is forced to accept this rather perverse and unpleasant man’s vision of the world, because no alternative is made available to us. Dostoyevski makes no attempt to present his character as attractive or likeable. We are simply being invited to consider his peculiar and often contradictory views.

When authors create first person narrators in this way, there is often a temptation to think that the narrator reflects the author’s own views. In some fiction (usually of poor quality) this might be the case; but in general (and certainly in good quality work) this is not or may not be true.

Many traditional ‘life history’ fictions use a first person narrator – such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850). This device usually has the effect of drawing the reader close to the narrator as a fictional character and lending credulity to their account of events.The reader is being encouraged to think of the character as a ‘real’ person.

Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and technical terms you need when making a study of stories and novels. It shows you how to understand literary analysis by explaining its elements one at a time, then showing them at work in short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. Topics covered include – setting, characters, story, point of view, symbolism, narrators, theme, construction, metaphors, irony, prose style, tone, close reading, and interpretation. The book also contains self-assessment exercises, so you can check your understanding of each topic.
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Point of view – the character

It is also perfectly normal for authors to give an account of events from the perspective of a character (or characters) in their narratives. This enables the author to create a credible vision of the world in which the character exists, and to invite readers to share (or reject) their personal point of view. This view can shift from one character to another, or it can stay with one character.

Franz Kafka’s dark and expressionistic novel The Trial (1925) opens with an innocent man being arrested:

Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. Frau Grubach’s cook, who brought him his breakfast every day, did not appear. That had never happened before. For while K waited—from his pillow he saw the old woman who lived opposite watching with, for her, quite unusual curiosity—but then, both perplexed and hungry, he rang. Immediately there was a knock at the door and a man he had never seen in the apartment came in. He was slimly yet solidly built and was wearing a close-fitting black suit which, like an outfit for travelling, was equipped with a variety of pleats, pockets, buckles, buttons, and a belt that made it appear especially practical without its precise purpose being clear.

After the opening sentence of the narrative, all the information we are given is delivered from Joseph K’s point of view. The non-appearance of his breakfast; the absence of the cook; his being observed (whilst in bed!) by an old lady opposite; and the sudden appearance of a stranger in his room – who has come to arrest him. Sometimes authors use the points of view of a number of characters in order to create a multi-dimensional account of reality which might be more complex and therefore more convincing than an account from a single perspective.

William Faulkner uses an interesting version of this mode in his novel As I Lay Dying (1930) in which members of a poor southern American family are transporting their dead mother in a coffin to be buried in a distant town. The narrative is a series of interior monologues in which each of the the characters reflect in turn on the others. This even includes the dead mother, from inside her coffin.

Strategies of this kind become in effect a series of overlapping first person narratives. The English novelist Laurence Durrell pushed this approach even further in his sequence of novels The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960). Four novels cover the same set of events as seen (largely) from the point of view of the four characters – Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea – who are involved in them.

Virginia Woolf developed an approach to narrative which used this device at a micro level. In her novel Mrs Dalloway, the reader is invited to view events largely from the point of view of her protagonist Clarissa Dalloway, but from time to time the view shifts momentarily to that of other characters:

She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Dornall’s van to pass. A charming woman Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.

The character Scrope Purvis never appears again in the novel, but for this single paragraph as they pass each other in the street we are invited to share his view of Clarissa. We see her from the point of view of a close neighbour, who knows she has been ill, and who admires her appearance and her manner. Later we will see her from the point of view of a close friend, an old admirer, and from the slightly antagonistic view of her own daughter.

This fluctuating point of view helps to generate what might be called a ‘three-dimensional’ view of the character, and it is closely associated with Virginia Woolf’s belief in the fluidity and relativity of human character – that a person can be one thing to one person and somebody quite different to another.

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Pomegranate Seed

November 15, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Pomegranate Seed first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on 25 April 1931. It was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, The World Over (1936), and then in her collection, Ghosts, published in 1937, the last year of the author’s life.

original Saturday Evening Post illustration

Pomegranate Seed – critical comments

This is simultaneously a mystery tale, a ‘ghost story’, and more importantly a penetrating study in the psychology of jealousy. The mystery element is possibly the least important and successful, because once the authorship of the grey letters has been explained, there is very little more to say about the issue, and no reason to re-read the tale.

As a ghost story it is more successful. Even though there is no explanation of how the letters come to have been written by somebody who has died a year previously, they act as a convincing metaphor for the influence a former love object might still exert on someone from beyond the grave. This part of the story also meshes successfully with Charlotte’s inflamed jealousy over the puzzle of the letters and the effect they have on her husband. She is in fact quite correct in he supposition that they were written by a woman who is a ‘previous engagement’ in his life – since they are written by the woman to whom he was married for twelve years.

The rapid fluctuations in Charlotte’s feelings as she tries to interpret the evidence at her disposal is a very convincing portrayal of the agonies and uncertainties of jealousy – how trivial details are seized upon and magnified to enormous proportions in the search for emotional resolution, and how a hairsbreadth can sometimes separate an imagined betrayal from an insight into one which is all too real.

The title of the story Pomegranate Seed is an oblique reference to the Greek myth in which Persephone, the goddess of fertility, is abducted and taken to Hades, where she breaks her vow of abstinence by eating some pomegranate seeds. It is not too difficult to see the fertile Elsie Corder (who bears her husband two children) as this figure who eventually lures her former husband to join her in the afterlife. She has written to him regularly; her last letters are only two days apart; and the only word Charlotte can decipher in the last is “Come” – though it has to be noted that he does not read this letter, having already departed to join his dead first wife.

Pomegranate Seed – study resources

The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Tales of Men and Ghosts – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Pomegranate Seed – story synopsis

Part I. Charlotte Gorse has been married to New York lawyer Kenneth Ashby for a year, following the early death of his first wife Elsie after twelve years together. Charlotte’s marriage has been successful, but she is puzzled by the regular appearance of a handwritten letter addressed to her husband which appears to upset him and change his mood, but about which he reveals nothing. On arriving home there is familiar grey envelope with spidery handwriting waiting in the hall.

Part II. She assume’s the letters might be from some woman in her husband’s past, is very tempted to open the latest, but instead spies on him when he arrives home. On seeing him kiss the letter, she challenges him and demands an explanation. He claims it is a business letter and refuses to divulge the name of its author.

Part III. Charlotte tries to be sympathetic to her husband’s obvious distress, but all she can see is that he is trying to be evasive. She proposes a holiday, but he says he cannot go. She continues to harass him with questions, and finally he agrees to the notion of a holiday.

Part IV. Next morning he leaves a message saying that she should prepare for the holiday the very next day. Charlotte at first feels triumphant because she has prevailed over the influence of the ‘other woman’. She tries to contact her husband throughout the day – without success, because nobody knows where he is. Finally, she goes to see her mother-in-law, where she thinks he might have called. He is not there, so the two women go back to Charlotte’s house, where they find another grey letter waiting. Charlotte decides to open it, but neither she nor Mrs Ashby can read the faint and spidery handwriting. They conclude that the letters have been coming from Kenneth Ashby’s dead wife, from beyond the grave, and that they ought to telephone the police.

Principal characters

Kenneth Ashby	a New York lawyer
Mrs Ashby	his mother
Elsie Corder	Ashby’s first wife, who is dead
Charlotte Gorse	Ashby’s second wife

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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The Reef deals with three topics with which Edith Wharton herself was intimately acquainted at the period of its composition – unhappy marriage, divorce, and the discovery of sensual pleasures. The setting is a country chateau in France where diplomat George Darrow has arrived from America, hoping to marry the beautiful widow Anna Leith. But a young woman employed as governess to Anna’s daughter proves to be someone he met briefly in the past and has fallen in love with him. She also becomes engaged to Anna’s stepson. The result is a quadrangle of tensions and suspicions about who knows what about whom. And the outcome is not what you might imagine.
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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

Poor Richard

August 4, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Poor Richard first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly magazine over three issues in June—August 1867. Its next appearance in book form was as part of the collection Stories Revived published in London by Macmillan 1885. This is the one of four stories James wrote with the American Civil War as a background. The other stories are The Story of a Year (1865), A Most Extraordinary Case (1868), and The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868).

The American Civil War – 1861-1865

Poor Richard – critical commentary

The title

The term Poor Richard is taken from a famous American publication, Poor Richard’s Almanack which was written and published each year in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin between 1732 and 1758. It was a very popular compilation of weather forecasts, practical household hints, and puzzles, and was padded out with aphorisms and proverbs related to thrift, industry, and frugality. Hence the link to Richard Maule’s progress via work, abstinence, and honesty.

Interpretation

It is difficult to see this story as anything but a warning against the fickleness of women. Gertrude ‘encourages’ Richard; she is in love with Captain Severn; and when Severn is killed in the war she is prepared to marry Major Lutterel, even though she does not love him. She is only twenty-four; she is rich, and she’s good-looking. There is no reason for her to accept an offer from a much older man for whom she feels no affection. Lutterel is thirty-six and he has no money.

Another way to see the story is as a short Bildungsroman – a narrative of growth and education into wisdom. Richard starts out as a drunken wastrel, and then propelled by his love for Gertrude manages to give some clarity and purpose to his life. He does not get the girl, but in the end he tells the truth, he sells the farm, does the honourable social thing by joining in the war, and on return takes up paid employment. That is a success of sorts.

Poor Richard – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Poor Richard – plot summary

Part I. Wastrel and poor orphan Richard Maule is in love with rich Gertrude Whittaker. He tries to persuade her to love him, and even proposes marriage. But she offers him only friendship in return, plus a willingness to help him ‘improve’.

Part II. Richard and Gertrude are old school friends. She has inherited a lot of money from her father. Richard has done virtually nothing except work on the farm he has inherited and allowed to run down. But the prospect of winning Gertrude inspires him to reform his life. Gertrude meanwhile decides it will help Richard if she introduces him to Captain Severn.

Part III. Severn is a serious, honourable, but poor man who accepts Gertrude’s comforts when he is injured in the Civil War. But he hasn’t enough money to marry, so they remain just good friends.

Gertrude invites Richard and Severn to meet each other – but they are joined unexpectedly by Major Lutterel and the event is ruined. Richard feels ill at ease in this more sophisticated company.

Part IV. After tea, they all go for a walk, during which Richard and Severn exchange opinions on Gertrude, and realise that they are rivals for her favour. Richard gauchely tries to impress everyone with his knowledge of the local river. There is a complex tension of competition between all three men for Gertrude’s attention.

Part V. Richard cultivates a regime of hard work and self-denial, hoping to overcome his obsession with Gertrude. One day he rides over to see her, only to discover Captain Severn just leaving and Gertrude very upset. Richard accuses her of being in love with Severn.

She is in fact holding out against both Severn and Richard, and it brings her little joy. But on mature reflection, she begins to see positives in Richard’s simplicity She drives over to his farm where he is apologetic for his behaviour. His courtesy and simple behaviour win her over.

News arrives of a defeat for the Unionists in the Civil War in Virginia. Richard and Major Lutterel leave Gertrude’s house, only to meet Captain Severn on his way to pay her his last respects before re-joining his regiment. Richard lies to Severn about Gertrude being away from home, and Major Lutterel is complicit in the deception, because he wishes to keep away all rivals, having decided that he wishes to marry Gertrude himself.

Richard wishes to reveal his guilt to Gertrude about the deception, but fails to do so because she receives him in a very neutral manner. He goes home with Major Lutterel, gets drunk, and by next day he is very ill with typhoid fever.

Part VI. Colonel Lutterel arrives at Gertrude’s house with the news of Richard’s illness. They drive over to see him, and Gertrude arranges nursing support for him. Whilst Richard is ill, Colonel Lutterel increases the intensity of his attentions to Gertrude, who although she is not in love with him is prepared to countenance a possible alliance.

The Major arrives at Gertrude’s house with the news that Richard is getting better and Captain Severn has been killed. He asks her to marry him, and although she tells him she does not love him, she is prepared to accept the offer.

Part VII. Gertrude makes her preparations for the marriage in secret, with a heavy heart. Major Lutterel visits Richard, where he denies having any news of Captain Severn, and reveals that he is engaged to Gertrude. Richard takes a stoical view, and hopes that his disappointment will help him recover. When he meets Gertrude she is pale and unhappy: he implores her to give up the plan to marry Major Lutterel. Suddenly Major Lutterel arrives, and Richard reveals the truth about Captain Severn’s last failed visit to see Gertrude. Gertrude breaks off her engagement with Lutterel and forgives Richard.

Richard sells the farm, pays off his debts, and joins the war. When he returns at the end of the war he finds employment in his old neighbourhood. Gertrude also sells up, and goes to live in Florence.

Poor Richard – principal characters

Richard Maule	a poor orphan of twenty-four
Gertrude Whittaker	a rich young woman of twenty-four
Fanny Maule	Richard’s sister, a friend of Gertrude
Captain Edmund Severn	a Unionist soldier of twenty-eight
Major Lutterel	a recruiting officer of thirty-six with no money
Mrs Martin	Captain Severn’s sister

Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

More tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
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Pride and Prejudice

January 24, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, criticism, video, resources

Pride and Prejudice (1813) has the famous opening line “It is a fact universally recognised that a man with a fortune must be in search a wife.” It’s a story of the empty-headed and garrulous Mrs Bennet, who has but one aim in life – to find a good match for each of her daughters. Her husband is a mild-mannered and indolent man, much given to making witty cynicisms, and he refuses to take this vulgar prospect seriously.

Jane Austen

The pride of the title belongs to its hero Mr Darcy, and the prejudice to heroine Elizabeth Bennet, who has lessons to learn from life. This was Jane Austen’s first major success as a novelist – though not the first of her books to be written. It’s a perfect place for readers to start – witty, sophisticated writing, and some well-observed character sketches. It seems as fresh today as ever.

Pride and Prejudice – plot summary

Mr. Bingley, a wealthy young gentleman, rents a country estate near the Bennets called Netherfield. He arrives in town accompanied by his fashionable sisters and his good friend, Mr. Darcy. While Bingley is well-received in the community, Darcy begins his acquaintance with smug condescension and proud distaste for all the ‘country’ people. Bingley and Jane Bennet begin to grow close despite Mrs. Bennet’s embarrassing interference and the opposition of Bingley’s sisters, who consider Jane socially inferior. Elizabeth is stung by Darcy’s haughty rejection of her at a local dance and decides to match his coldness with her own wit.

At the same time Elizabeth begins a friendship with Mr. Wickham, a militia officer who relates a prior acquaintance with Darcy. Wickham tells her that he has been seriously mistreated by Darcy. Elizabeth immediately seizes upon this information as another reason to hate Darcy. Ironically, but unbeknownst to her, Darcy finds himself gradually drawn to Elizabeth.

Just as Bingley appears to be on the point of proposing marriage he quits Netherfield, leaving Jane confused and upset. Elizabeth is convinced that Bingley’s sisters have conspired with Darcy to separate Jane and Bingley.

Before Bingley leaves, Mr. Collins, the male relative who is to inherit Longbourn, makes a sudden appearance and stays with the Bennets. He is a recently ordained clergyman employed by the wealthy and patronizing Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Though he was partially entreated to visit by his patroness, Collins has another reason for visiting: he wishes to find a wife from among the Bennet sisters.

Mr. Bennet and Elizabeth are amused by his self-important and pedantic behaviour. He immediately enters pursuit of Jane; however, when Mrs. Bennet mentions her preoccupation with Mr. Bingley, he turns to Elizabeth. He soon proposes marriage to Elizabeth, who refuses him, much to her mother’s distress. Collins quickly recovers and proposes to Elizabeth’s close friend, Charlotte Lucas, who immediately accepts him. Once the marriage is arranged, Charlotte asks Elizabeth to come for an extended visit.

In the spring, Elizabeth joins Charlotte and her cousin at his parish in Kent. The parish is adjacent to Rosings Park, the grand manor of Mr. Darcy’s aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, where Elizabeth is frequently invited. While calling on Lady Catherine, Mr. Darcy encounters Elizabeth. She discovers from a cousin of Darcy that it was he who separated Bingley and Jane. Soon after, Darcy admits his love of Elizabeth and proposes to her. Insulted by his high-handed and insulting manner of proposing, Elizabeth refuses him. When he asks why she should refuse him, she confronts him with his sabotage of Bingley’s relationship with Jane and Wickham’s account of their dealings.

Deeply shaken by Elizabeth’s vehemence and accusations, Darcy writes her a letter justifying his actions. The letter reveals that Wickham soon dissipated his legacy-settlment (from Darcy’s father’s estate), then came back to Darcy requesting permanent patronage; he became angry when rejected, accusing Darcy of cheating him. To exact revenge and to make off with part of the Darcy family fortune, he attempted to seduce Darcy’s young sister Georgiana – to gain her hand and fortune, almost persuading her to elope with him – before he was found out and stopped. Darcy justifies his actions from having observed that Jane did not show any reciprocal interest in his friend; thus his aim in separating them was mainly to protect Bingley from heartache.

After reading the letter, Elizabeth begins to question both her family’s behaviour and Wickham’s credibility; she concludes that Wickham is not as trustworthy as his easy manners would indicate, and that her early impressions of Darcy may not have been accurate. Soon after receiving the letter Elizabeth returns home.

Some months later, during a tour of Derbyshire with her aunt and uncle, Elizabeth visits Pemberley, Darcy’s estate. Unexpectedly, Darcy arrives at Pemberly as they tour its grounds. He makes an effort to be gracious and welcoming to them, thus strengthening Elizabeth’s newly favourable impression of him. Darcy then introduces Elizabeth to his sister Georgiana. He treats her uncle and aunt very well, and finds them of a more sound character than her other relatives, whom he previously dismissed as socially inferior.

Elizabeth and Darcy’s renewed acquaintance is cut short when news arrives that Elizabeth’s younger sister Lydia has run away with Wickham. Initially, the Bennets believes that Wickham and Lydia have eloped, but soon it is surmised that Wickham has no plans to marry Lydia. Lydia’s antics threaten the family’s reputation and the Bennet sisters with social ruin. Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle hurriedly leave Derbyshire, and Elizabeth is convinced that Darcy will avoid her from now on.

Soon, thanks to the intervention of Elizabeth’s uncle, Lydia and Wickham are found and married. After the marriage, Wickham and Lydia make a visit to Longbourne. While bragging to Elizabeth, Lydia comments that Darcy was present at the wedding. Surprised, Elizabeth sends an inquiry to her aunt, from whom she discovers that Darcy was responsible for both finding the couple and arranging their marriage at great expense to himself.

Soon after, Bingley and Darcy return to the area. Bingley proposes marriage to Jane, and this news starts rumours that Darcy will propose to Elizabeth. Lady Catherine travels to Longbourn with the sole aim of confronting Elizabeth and demanding that she never accept such a proposal. Elizabeth refuses to bow to Lady Catherine’s demands. When news of this obstinacy reaches Darcy, it convinces him that her opinion of him has changed. When he visits, he once again proposes marriage. Elizabeth accepts, and the two become engaged.

Elizabeth and Darcy settle at Pemberley where Mr. Bennet visits often. Mrs. Bennet remains frivolous and silly, and often visits the new Mrs. Bingley and talking of the new Mrs. Darcy. Later, Jane and Bingley move from Netherfield to avoid Jane’s mother and Meryton relations and to locate near the Darcys in Derbyshire. Elizabeth and Jane manage to teach Kitty greater social grace, and Mary learns to accept the difference between herself and her sisters’ beauty and mixes more with the outside world. Lydia and Wickham continue to move often, leaving their debts for Jane and Elizabeth to pay off. At Pemberley, Elizabeth and Georgiana grow close, though Georgiana is surprised by Elizabeth’s playful treatment of Darcy. Lady Catherine stays very angry with her nephew’s marriage but over time the relationship between the two is repaired and she eventually decides to visit them. Elizabeth and Darcy also remain close with her uncle and aunt.

Study resources

Pride and Prejudice – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Pride and Prejudice – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Jane Austen Complete Works – 6-book Boxed Set – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice – Audio book – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice – 1995 BBC TV drama on DVD – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice – Brodie’s Notes – AMazon UK

Pride and Prejudice – York Notes (Advanced) – AMazon UK

Pride and Prejudice – York Notes (GCSE) – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice – Cliffs Notes – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice – eBook at Project Gutenberg – [FREE]

Pride and Prejudice – audioBook at LibriVox – [FREE]

Pride and Prejudice – Routledge Guide

Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen – 6-book boxed set

Jane Austen: Selected Letters – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen – Amazon UK

The Complete Critical Guide to Jane Austen – Amazon UK

Jane Austen: A Biography

Jane Austen at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Jane Austen at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Principal characters

Mr Bennet	Head of family, with wife and daughters, much given to sardonic criticism
Mrs Bennet	His frivolous and excitable wife, socially ambitious for her daughters
Jane Bennet	The eldest daughter – 22 years old – who is considered a local beauty
Elizabeth Bennet	Second eldest daughter – 20 years old – intelligent, attractive, and witty
Mary Bennet	The plain Bennet daughter – bookish and unsociable
Catherine (Kitty) Bennet	The Fourth Bennet daughter – 17 years old
Lydia Bennet	The youngest Bennet daughter – 15 years old – frivolous, flirtatious, and headstrong
Charles Bingley	Gentleman without an estate – 22 years old – friend of Darcy
Caroline Bingley	Bingley’s proud and snobbish sister
Fitzwilliam Darcy	Wealthy estate owner – 28 years old – friend of Bingley
George Wickham	Officer in the militia and old acquaintance of Darcy
William Collins	Clergyman cousin to Mr Bennett – and heir to his estate
Lady Catherine de Bourgh	Wealthy, haughty, domineering, and condescending
Mr Gardiner	Mrs Bennett’s brother, and a friend to the family

Pride and Prejudice – film version

2005 adaptation, with Donald Sutherland and Keira Knightly

Genesis of the text

The novel was originally titled First Impressions by Jane Austen, and was written between October 1796 and August 1797. It was submitted for publication to a London bookseller by her father, but rejected.

Austen revised the text between 1811 and 1812, re-naming it Pride and Prejudice, and sold the manuscript outright for 110. It was published in three volumes in January 1813, priced at 18s. Two further editions were published in the next four years.

The scholarly edition produced by R.W.Chapman in 1923 has become the standard edition on which many modern editions of the novel are based.

Jane Austen’s writing

the manuscript of Sanditon

Selected criticism

F.W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her Predecessors, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form, Cambridge (Mass), 1979.

Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, revised 1987.

W.A. Craick, Jane Austen: the Six Novels, London: Methuen, 1965.

D.D. Devlin, Jane Austen and Education, London, 1975.

Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels, Baltimore (Md) and London, 1971.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination, New Haven and London, 1979.

John Halperin (ed), Jane Austen Bicentenary Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Barbara Hardy, A Reading of Jane Austen, London, 1975.

Joycelyn Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, Cambridge, 1989.

Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, Chicago and London, 1988.

Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction, Brighton and Totawa (NJ) 1983.

Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.

A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen: a Study of her Artistic Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Juliet McMaster (ed), Jane Austen’s Achievement, London: Macmillan, 1976.

David Monaghan, Jane Austen in a Social Context, Totawa (NJ) 1981.

Laura G. Mooneyham, Citical Essays on Jane Austen, Twayne Publishers, 1998.

Susan Morgan, In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction, Chicago, 1980.

Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen, London: Blackwell, 1972.

K.C. Phillips, Jane Austen’s English, London: Andre Deutsch, 1970.

Adrian Poole, The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen , London: Macmillan, 1976.

Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution, New York, 1979.

B.C. Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development through the Surviving Papers, London and New York, 1964.

B.C. Southam (ed), Critical Essays on Jane Austen, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

B.C. Southam (ed), Jane Austen: the Critical Heritage, 2 vols, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1968-87.

Alison G. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood, Philadelphia, 1989.

Tony Tanner, Jane Austen, London: Macmillan, 1986.

Ian Watt (ed), Jane Austen: a Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice-Hall, 1963.

Pride and Prejudice – film version

1940 version, with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier

Other novels by Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility (1811) casts two young and marriageable sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood as representatives of ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ respectively. Elinor bears her social disappointments with dignity and restraint – and thereby gets her man. Marianne on the other hand is excitable and impetuous, following her lover to London – where she quickly becomes disillusioned with him. Recovering and gaining more ‘sense’, she then finally sees the good qualities in her old friend Colonel Brandon, who has been waiting in the wings and is now conveniently on hand to propose marriage.
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Northanger Abbey (1818) opens in the drawing rooms of Bath. The heroine is imaginative Catherine Morland who falls in love with Henry Tilney, a young clergyman. When he invites her to meet his family at the Abbey however, she sees nothing but Gothic melodrama at every turn – since they were very fashionable at the time. Her visions of medieval horror prove groundless of course. This is Jane Austen’s satirical critique of Romantic cliché and excess. But Catherine eventually learns to see the world in a realistic light – and gets her man in the end. This volume also contains the early short novels Lady Susan and The Watsons, as well as the unfinished Sanditon.
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Mansfield Park (1814) is more serious after the comedy of the earlier novels. Heroine Fanny Price is adopted into the family of her rich relatives. She is long-suffering and passive to a point which makes her almost unappealing – but her refusal to tolerate any drop in moral standards eventually teaches lessons to all concerned. (All that is except standout character Mrs Norris who is a sponging and interfering Aunt you will never forget.) The hero Edmund is dazzled by sexually attractive Mary Crawford – but in the nick of time sees the error of his ways and marries Fanny instead. Slow moving, but full of moral subtleties.
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Emma (1816) Charming and wilful Emma Woodhouse amuses herself by dabbling in other people’s affairs, planning their lives the way she sees fit. Most of her match-making plots go badly awry, and moral confusion reigns until she abandons her self-delusion and wakes up to the fact that stern but honourable Mr Knightly is the right man for her after all. As usual, money and social class underpin everything. Some wonderful comic scenes, and a rakish character Frank Churchill who finally reveals his flaws by making the journey to London just to get his hair cut.

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Persuasion (1818) is the most mature of her novels, if one of the least exciting. Heroine Anne Elliott has been engaged to Captain Wentworth, but has broken off the engagement in deference to family and friends. Meeting him again eight years later, she goes against conventional wisdom and accepts his second proposal of marriage. Anne is a sensitive and thoughtful character, quite unlike some of the earlier heroines. Jane Austen wrote of her “She is almost too good for me”. There is a shift of location to Lyme Regis for this novel, which reveals for the first time a heroine acting from a deep sense of personal conviction, against the grain of conventional wisdom.
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Further reading

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Pride and Prejudice – plot summary

Study resources

Principal characters

Pride and Prejudice – film version

Genesis of the text

Jane Austen’s writing

Selected criticism

Pride and Prejudice – film version

Other novels by Jane Austen

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