Greetings and Salutations to my Fellow Perth Janeites and any other Janeite who happens upon this blog. I do hope you are all keeping well.
I just wanted to remind you all that we are scheduled to meet again next month, specifically Saturday 14th April at 2:30pm, the usual place. (For those who would like to come along and don’t know ‘the usual place’, do send me an email at – moab.is.my.washpot@hotmail.com – and I shall let you know the top secret details regarding ‘the usual place’.)
There is no specific Jane Austen reading for our April meeting as Lauris is presenting a little talk on the subject of ‘Sisters in Jane Austen’s Novels and Life’, which means you could read your favourite Jane Austen novel or some of her letters to Cassandra in order to have some interesting things to add to the conversation. Or you can simply come along, sit, listen, drink tea, eat cake and just enjoy being in the company of your Fellow Janeites.
My apologies for not having posted any Jane Austen related news since, I think, December. You are not the only blog I have been ignoring, or the writing assignment I have been avoiding. My nickname is Queen Procrastinator for a reason.
I have been frantically scanning my Jane Austen’s Regency World collection so I can post interesting articles that you may have missed and will endeavour to pop a few ‘sister’ related ones here before the meeting in case you wanted to do some prep for April 14.
Once again, I invite my Fellow Perth Janeites to send me any little tit-bits, photos, or blessays, (Stephen Fry lingo for blog essays), that they would like to have posted here. This is a blog for all of us, by all of us. Have you just been to Jane Austen Land and wish to brag to the rest of us, then write a little brag and send some tantalising photos and I will post for all to see and envy over.
Until the next time,
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The following is from an article on the BBC News website.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-16002088
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16 December 2011 Last updated at 09:01 GMT
Remains of Jane Austen’s Steventon home unearthed
Archaeologists in Hampshire have uncovered signs of the house where Jane Austen spent more than half of her life.
The Austen family lived in the rectory in Steventon, near Basingstoke, from 1775 to 1801, where the writer began three of her novels.
Contemporary drawings showed different views of the Austens’ house
The house was demolished early in the 19th Century soon after Austen and her family moved to Bath.
Volunteers involved in the dig hope to gain an insight into life in the house.
Debbie Charlton, of archaeologists Archaeo Briton, who led the dig, said: “Our main focus for the project is putting together the puzzle of what Jane’s first home was like.”
Although the original shape of the building was recorded on a local map in the early 1800s, it was not to scale and the few drawings made by different artists appear contradictory.
The excavation was undertaken by a team of volunteers
Austen’s social life while she lived at Steventon is said to have provided her with material for her novels.
While at Steventon, she started to pen the drafts that became Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey.
They were later completed when the family returned to Hampshire to live in the village of Chawton, near Winchester.
The house there is now a museum and tourist attraction.
Maureen Stiller, of the Jane Austen Society, said: “Experience went into writing her novels, so obviously the people she met and things she did must have fed into her work. This is where it all started.
“I hope the Austen devotees are going to be excited – it gives us a bit more insight into the proportions of the rectory and hopefully a bit of the social life.”
Jane Austen lived at Steventon from 1775 to 1801
Having completed the archaeological excavations, the project volunteers will collate the finds for display at the Willis Museum at Basingstoke next year.
Ms Charlton said: “It’s been fantastic and a wonderful opportunity. It’s been a joy – every day has brought some excitement.”
The work was carried out with a £10,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and supported by The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Community Foundation.
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I hope my Fellow Janeites are getting into the festive spirit now that the Silly Season is upon us. Apologies to my Fellow Perth Janeites that I will not be with you this weekend for our gathering as I am off to Melbourne tomorrow. However, before I hop on the plane, I wanted to share this article with you, which was tweeted to followers of Chawton House (@ChawtonHouse) 46 minutes ago. The following is the article copied from the UK’s Daily Mail website.
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Is this what Jane Austen really looked like? Newly discovered sketch could be lost portrait of 19th century novelist
Last updated at 2:06 AM on 5th December 2011
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2070026/Is-Jane-Austen-really-looked-like-Newly-discovered-sketch-lost-portrait-19th-century-novelist.html#ixzz1feVq4SZH
The author of a forthcoming biography on Jane Austen believes she has unearthed a previously undiscovered portrait of the novelist.
Dr Paula Byrne was midway through her new book when her husband surprised her with a portrait of a female writer bought at auction, according to the Christmas Radio Times.
She spotted the long, straight ‘Austen nose’ seen in images of the writer’s father and brothers, and enlisted the help of a team of experts and the BBC to test her as yet unproven thesis that the woman is the famous author, who died in 1817 aged 41.
- New look: Paula Byrne is convinced that the woman in this sketch is one of Britain’s best-loved authors. Her find is the subject of a new BBC2 documentary, Jane Austen: The Unseen Portrait?, to be broadcast on Boxing Day in the UK.
The only known images with proven provenance of the author of Sense And Sensibility, Pride And Prejudice and Emma to date are an 1810 sketch by Austen’s sister Cassandra – in which the writer is said to look a little cross – and an ‘idealised’ portrait used as the frontispiece to the Austen memoir written by her nephew in 1870.
Dr Byrne, whose Austen biography, The Real Jane Austen, is being published by HarperCollins in 2013, believes the new portrait could transform the author’s image.
‘The memoir portrait has always rather annoyed me. It makes her look pretty and dim,’ she said.
‘It feeds this whole notion of “Aunt Jane”, the demure spinster who was very good at spillikins and enjoyed scribbling on the side, but was content with her life in the shadows.
‘Scholars know there was so much more to her and for me this new picture encapsulates – almost too perfectly – that other side.
‘She’s a professional woman presenting herself to the world with the tools of her trade. It’s the image of Jane Austen so many of us have been waiting for.’
Dr Byrne, whose previous work includes Jane Austen And The Theatre, and Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson, said she had a jolt of recognition as soon as she saw the image.
‘My immediate reaction was, “My God, it’s Jane Austen!”. It was the nose that did it,’ she added.
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The time for the Christmas meeting of the Perth Chapter of the Jane Austen Society of Australia is fast approaching! We are scheduled to meet on Saturday 10th December at 2:30pm, the usual place.
I have been scanning my copies of the Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine and in the process of doing so, I came across the following article, which I thought might help to put you all in an Austen-y Christmas Mood for the meeting.
An Austen Christmas by Sheryl Craig – Jane Austen’s Regency World, November/December 2009
And in the same issue of Jane Austen’s Regency World is a Christmas mystery by Carrie Bebris and starring everyone’s favourite Austen couple, The Darcys.
A Midwinter Night’s Dream: A Mr & Mrs Darcy Mystery
For those interested in joining the Perth Janeites for their Christmas meeting, please contact our Meeting Coordinator, Helen for further details at jasaperth@hotmail.com.
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A friend has just sent me a link to the article (copied below) from the UK’s The Guardian newspaper website. What do you think?
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Jane Austen ‘died from arsenic poisoning’
Crime writer Lindsay Ashford bases claim on reading of author’s letters and claims murder cannot be ruled out
Almost 200 years after she died, Jane Austen‘s early death at the age of just 41 has been attributed to many things, from cancer to Addison’s disease. Now sleuthing from a crime novelist has uncovered a new possibility: arsenic poisoning.
Author Lindsay Ashford moved to Austen’s village of Chawton three years ago, and began writing her new crime novel in the library of the novelist’s brother Edward’s former home, Chawton House. She soon became engrossed in old volumes of Austen’s letters, and one morning spotted a sentence Austen wrote just a few months before she died: “I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour.”
Having researched modern forensic techniques and poisons for her crime novels, Ashford immediately realised the symptoms could be ascribed to arsenic poisoning, which can cause “raindrop” pigmentation, where patches of skin go brown or black, and other areas go white.
Shortly afterwards she met the former president of the Jane Austen Society of North America, who told her that the lock of Austen’s hair on display at a nearby museum had been tested for arsenic by the now deceased American couple who bought it an auction in 1948, coming up positive.
Ashford says that chronic arsenic poisoning gives all the symptoms Austen wrote about in her letters, unlike other possibilities which have been put forward for her death, from Addison’s disease, to the cancer Hodgkin’s disease and the auto-immune disease lupus. Arsenic was also widely available at the time, handed out in the form of Fowler’s Solution as a treatment for everything from rheumatism – something Austen complained of in her letters – to syphilis.
“After all my research I think it’s highly likely she was given a medicine containing arsenic. When you look at her list of symptoms and compare them to the list of arsenic symptoms, there is an amazing correlation,” Ashford told the Guardian. “I’m quite surprised no one has thought of it before, but I don’t think people realise quite how often arsenic was used as a medicine. [But] as a crime writer I’ve done a lot of research into arsenic, and I think it was just a bit of serendipity, that someone like me came to look at her letters with a very different eye to the eye most people cast on Jane Austen. It’s just luck I have this knowledge, which most Austen academics wouldn’t.”
Although Ashford thinks that, based on her symptoms and on the fact arsenic was so widespread, it is “highly likely” that Austen was suffering from arsenic poisoning after being prescribed it by a doctor for another disease, she explores the possibility that the novelist was murdered with arsenic in her new novel, The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen. “I don’t think murder is out of the question,” she said. “Having delved into her family background, there was a lot going on that has never been revealed and there could have been a motive for murder. In the early 19th century a lot of people were getting away with murder with arsenic as a weapon, because it wasn’t until the Marsh test was developed in 1836 that human remains could be analysed for the presence of arsenic.”
Professor Janet Todd, editor for the Cambridge edition of Jane Austen, said that murder was implausible. “I doubt very much she would have been poisoned intentionally. I think it’s very unlikely. But the possibility she had arsenic for rheumatism, say, is quite likely,” she said. “It’s certainly odd that she died quite so young. [But] in the absence of digging her up and finding out, which would not be appreciated, nobody knows what she died of.”
Although Ashford would be keen to see Austen’s bones disinterred for modern forensic analysis, she accepts this is unlikely to happen. “I can quite understand that people would be outraged by the idea,” she said.
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I am currently going through my Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine collection to scan articles I thought might be of interest to my Fellow Janeites.
I came to the November 2003 edition and discovered an article that made me yearn, I mean really yearn, for England. Specifically, for Bath.
If, like me, you find yourself a little miffed to be in Perth, or anywhere other than England, then you may like to read the article below and help it transport you to the cobbled streets of wonderful Bath.
Right now, yes, my body and some part of my brain is typing this bloggy post to you all, but the rest of me is in Bath walking the gravel path near the Royal Crescent with Captain Wentworth. Oops, nope, now I am Catherine Morland and I am being dragged around Bath by Isabella Thorpe who has decided to stalk the young men she spotted from the North Passage near the Roman Baths. Should I risk interferring with the story by giving her a bop on the head with my parasol, (because, naturally, I am properly ”armed for Bath”), and letting her know what an awful creature she is? No, best not. Ooh, it’s the Sally Lunn Tea Shop. I think it’s time to stop for a yummy chicken and cheese Bath bun washed down with a luxury hot chocolate!
Okay. I think I have just imagined myself into a state of discontent. I have opened my eyes and I am quite obviously in Perth, Western Australia.
Sigh.
Jane Austen’s Regency World, November 2003, ‘November and December in Bath’
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I just received a tweet from Chawton House and author Lindsay Ashford has just published a book titled The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen. It is available from Amazon, The Book Depository and I am sure that Dymocks can order it in for you if they don’t have any in stock.
I have no idea what it is like, I just wanted to bring it to your attention. If anyone has the time or inclination to read it and would like to share their views with their Fellow Janeites via this blog, then please do email me your thoughts for posting. (My email address is moab.is.my.washpot@hotmail.com)
The book’s vital stats, courtesey of Amazon.co.uk, are:
- Paperback:320 pages
- Publisher:HONNO WELSH WOMEN’S PRESS (20 Oct 2011)
- LanguageEnglish
- ISBN-10:1906784264
- ISBN-13: 978-1906784263
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The following is an short article by Richard Cavendish and which appeared in History Today magazine, volume 61, issue 10, 2011.
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- Title page of the first edition of Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’.
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was first published in London by Thomas Egerton on October 30th, 1811.
Jane Austen was 35 when her first published novel appeared and had less than six years left to live. The youngest of seven children of a Hampshire clergy-man, George Austen, she wrote stories and poems from her childhood on and read them aloud to her family, who enjoyed them, as well as plays that the family acted out. The anarchic, boisterous humour of some of the early work has been compared to Monty Python. According to her sister Cassandra, Jane had written the first version of a novel she called Elinor and Marianne by 1796 and she began First Impressions (later Pride and Prejudice) in October that year. Late in 1797 her father offered it to a London publisher, who sent it straight back by return post without bothering to read it. She drastically altered Elinor and Marianne in 1797-98.
In 1801 the Austens moved to Bath where Jane’s output fell off, whether because the move made her happy or unhappy is unclear. The family moved back to Hampshire in 1809 and settled in Chawton, near Alton, in the house which is now the Jane Austen’s House Museum. Revised once more in 1809-10, Elinor and Marianne came out at last in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility, ‘a novel in three volumes, By a Lady’, published in London by Thomas Egerton. The Lady in question was obliged to cover any losses, but in fact she cleared £140 from the first edition, equivalent to £9,000 or more today. To Cassandra she compared her feelings about seeing her work in print with those of a mother with a suckling child.
Miss Austen took care to conceal her identity. When she and her niece Anna saw a copy of the novel in the local circulating library Anna said, that with a title like that it must be rubbish. Her aunt looked amused, but made no comment. She let Anna into the secret later.
The novel made a good impression and Egerton published Pride and Prejudice in 1813 and Mansfield Park the following year. The later novels were published by John Murray. Word of the author’s identity spread through the literary and fashionable worlds and the Prince Regent, who was a fan, suggested she dedicate Emma to him, which she reluctantly did. Richard Brinsley Sheridan called Pride and Prejudice ‘one of the cleverest things he ever read’. Another admirer was Sir Walter Scott, who wrote after Jane Austen’s death in 1817:
The big wow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is beyond me.
The plaudits have very properly gone on raining down ever since.
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For those who do not subscribe to the UK magazine Jane Austen’s Regency World, here follows a little synopsis of the news and articles contained in the September/October 2011 edition.
- A new film, Austenland is in production and stars American Keri Russell whose thirty-something single character finds her love life ruined by her obsession with Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy. (I am sure there are a few of us who could relate to that!) Her obsession draws her to England in the hope of meeting the perfect Regency gentleman. The film also stars the gorgeous J.J. Feild who recently wooed female audiences with his portrayal of Henry Tilney in the 2007 television adaptation of Northanger Abbey.
- If you are interested in Regency charades you may want to check out Mark Turner’s new blog which will be devoted to the topic. Mark intends to provide his readers with historical information about the charades, as well as posting examples from his charade collection.
- A handwritten manuscript of The Watsons was sold by Sotheby’s London in July for a meagre £993,250 by the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.
- Check out Australian musicologist Gillian Dooley’s website which contains the fruits of her research into Jane Austen’s music as well as some recordings to enjoy.
In ‘Your Letters’, Anne Rice writes to the editor about an article that appeared in edition No. 44 about the controversial Rice Portrait, which some believe to be of a young Jane Austen and disputes the claims of Deidre La Faye about her dating of the portrait subject’s dress making the subject unlikely to be Jane.
- The controversial Rice Portrait c. 1790 believed by some to be of a young Jane Austen
You can follow the controversial debate on the good-old Internet. The painting belonged to recently deceased Henry Price, a descendant of Jane Austen’s brother Edward. Mr Price claimed that his family had always believed the painting to be a portrait of their illustrious ancestor. The National Portrait Gallery of London has spent many years investigating the painting and its experts believe that this could in no way be a portrait of Jane Austen. A Google search for the ‘Rice Portrait Jane Austen‘ will take those of you with an interest in finding out more to a few articles on the subject.
The Duchess of Cambridge on her Wedding Day
Apparently the recently wed Catherine Middleton, aka the Duchess of Cambridge, is related to Jane Austen via Henry Percy (1382-1455), the great-great grandson of Edward III. Ancestry.co.uk have discovered that Henry Percy is the Duchess’ 15th great grandfather and his wife Catherine, the 15th great aunt of Jane Austen. For those who are interested in trying to discover if there is some chance they are a distant relative of the great Miss Austen you may want to sign up to Ancestry.co.uk and get searching. What do they say on their ads?: “You don’t need to know what you’re looking for, you just need to start looking.”
Other articles include Penelope Friday on how illness and death was tackled in the Regency Period and in Jane Austen’s novels; Maggie Lane on how Jane Austen used the plot device of characters overhearing others talking to move her story forward; Linda Slothouber on the issue of the shortage of copper coins and the resulting hardship during the period 1775-1797; and Sue Wilkes on the life of Sir Robert Peel, not the famous PM, but his equally illustrious father, a politician and “prime mover in factory reform”.
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While the topics for our meetings are still to be finalised, our dates have been set for 2012, so have your diaries to the ready to book us in! And it’s still the traditional time of 2:30pm.
Saturday February 4th – Members Helen and Alanah will be presenting on ‘How to research Jane Austen’. - Bring along your pen and paper, or whatever electronic form of note-taking you are using in these technologically advanced times, because the girls will be giving us lots of splendid clues on how to delve deeper into the archives of the Austen World.
Saturday April 7th – Member Lauris will be presenting on ‘Sisters in Jane Austen’s Novels’. - Oh no, how awful! We will have to do some reading of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion in preparation. Won’t we hate that. [insert smiley wink here]
Saturday June 2nd – Topic to be confirmed
August – Date and topic to be confirmed
Saturday October 6th – Members Kay and Marcel will be presenting on ‘Jane Austen and Crime’. – I would suggest that a useful research tool for this meeting would be our very own President Susannah Fullerton’s tome titled Jane Austen and Crime. You may even want to check out the Old Bailey website and find some Regency Rogues for us to discuss.
Saturday December 1st – Christmas Meeting with topic to be confirmed and drinks to be ordered!
If you would like to come along to our meeting, please contact our Meeting Coordinator Helen at jasaperth@hotmail.com.
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