Laura Carroll will be giving a a free public lecture on Jane Austen in Brisbane, at 7pm on Monday 17 November. It’s in the dining hall of Duchesne College, University of Queensland, St Lucia campus. Refreshments served after.
“Warming the imagination with scenes of the past”: Time-travel romances about Jane Austen.
How can we really get into Jane Austen’s world? Do we fall through the looking-glass or stumble through the back of the wardrobe, or will a good old-fashioned concussion do the trick? Amongst the flood of new products recently marketed by the ever-resourceful Austen industry is a fascinating group of fictional works – novels and a television show – dealing with time-travelling contact between our world and Austen’s.
In these works, passionate Austen aficionados from the present are magically transported back to Austen’s England where they attempt to ‘pass’ as Regency types, notice what the novels exclude (dirt, bodies, servants, Americans) and encounter both the elusive authoress herself and Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, who, somehow and surprisingly, appears to be even more explosively sexy in person than he is in fiction. Although the ‘reality’ of Jane Austen’s world is never exactly how they had pictured it, the time-travellers must somehow reconcile their fervent attachments to the scenes of the past with their knowledge of themselves as essentially twenty-first century persons.
Bizarre and occasionally perverse as these works are, they offer a rich vein of insight into the bizarre and often perverse nature of Jane Austen’s immense and durable popularity among readers of all varieties. These time-travel fictions make full use of the imaginative possibilities afforded by fantasy and romance to explore passionate readerly experiences of the kind that ‘disciplined’ literary criticism has difficulty thinking about.
Try The Republic of Pemberley. Mentioned on my blog in another context today.
Sorry that’s a dead link. Try again.
Try The Republic of Pemberley. Mentioned on my blog in another context today.
Why is that horrible man touching that nice lady’s dress and why didn’t he do up his buttons????
Apart from most of the Austen novels, I’ve only read Jane Austen’s letters.Which I thought were pretty informative.
At first glance I thought she was author of ‘Trembling Through Time’.
Sounds more interesting than Tumbling Through Time.
Ambigulous, shouldn’t that be: why didn’t the servant do up his buttons;) i guess that it is hard to get good help these days.
I havn’t read any of those time travel Austen books, but i did like Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, and sequals, which include several characters from the Austenverse.
I notice that Fredericks of Hollywood had a franchise in Regency England.
Thanks for the plug Mark, I would love to see any LP people there. And katz, yes, they were also quite big on the chest waxing for the more foppish gentlemans.
Good on you, laura
Hmmm. Mary Sue eat your heart out…
No probs, Laura! It sounds like it’ll be really fascinating – I’m not 100% I’ll be able to make it but I hope to!
Wow! I really dig the “Share this…” bit under the piccie.
It is an awfully generous offer but I’m not quite sure if my wife would be into it.
Sounds like fun Laura. hope you have a great time with it.
Oh dear, oh dear. What is it with this female fascination with damaged goods?
If you want a fantasy fling with some fictional bloke with problems, why go for a buttoned-down prig like Darcy?
Why not someone like Harry Flashman from the Frazer novels of the same name?
Now there was a dude with issues.
He might have been a rotter, a cad and a bounder, but at least he could give a girl a decent bodice-ripping knee-trembler without having to get one of the servants to starch his rod for him first.
Darcy? Jaaaaaysus.
Darcy is, frankly, perfect. Sorry Evan, but he is. As for whether or not he can perform, I direct you to the conversation where Caroline Bingley offers to mend his pen for him. ‘No thank you, I always mend my own’ he says. Nudge nudge wink wink.
For me the appeal of Jane Austen is that her books are multi-level – one can read them as ’stories’ for light entertainment, or at other differing levels depending on how clever you feel at the time.
Pride and Prejudice not only has this multi-level approach, but also many of its characters and their actions can take on different meanings depending on the viewpoint of the reader, rather than being the sole construct of the author.
For example, ask a group of Jane Austen fans whether or not Mr Darcy is shy – then stand well back as opposing sides try to prove the unprovable (they will ultimately rely on their opinions rather than any ‘facts’).
In other words, Pride and Prejudice is an extremely clever novel whose meanings and lessons depend ultimately on the prejudices of its readers.
It is these deep complexities that elevate Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austen to the ranks of the Greats of English Lit. – not how long Mr Darcy’s pen is.
So is that a postmodern, post-Barthes interpretation then, Marks? But assuming that you are right here –
In other words, Pride and Prejudice is an extremely clever novel whose meanings and lessons depend ultimately on the prejudices of its readers.
- then maybe this, too, is a joke played on the reader by Austen: as indicated by the title!
I don’t think that’s particularly postmodern, TimT – it’s just a truism, I’d have thought, that different readers find different things in texts.
Not postmodern. RB Sheridan commented on the cleverness (bu**ered if I can find the ref though), and I think that JA built on the observation of Mark at 18 as part of her novel framework. (The reason being that she quite consistently leaves out information, that could ‘prove’ certain character traits in some of her characters, or uses language that on the first reading means one thing, but on the second…may well not mean that at all).
Definitely a joke on her readers at one level (those she described as ‘dull elves’) and a joke with her readers at another.
(’I do not write for such dull Elves As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.’”
letter to Cassandra on the release of Pride and Prejudice
January 29, 1813 )
Marks, the ‘dull elves’ remark is related to JA’s mild dismay at the many typos in her novel, including the leaving-out of speech cues which make it look as though Mr Bennet is saying some of Kitty’s speeches. She certainly wasn’t trying to confuse the dumber members of her readership.
Back when the world wide web was just starting up, I and a similarly technologically inclined friend had a local cottage industry building, configuring and servicing personal computers. Our select clientele was drawn largely from Teh Academy. We made two models: The Lizzie, and The Mister Darcy. One was basic, solid, dependable, and economical, the other we would customise with the latest, greatest, and flashest components, money occasionally being no object for that crowd, then. No-one ever asked for Mr Collins, or a Lydia.
Oh no Laura, I certainly would not accuse Miss Austen of the grave impoliteness of trying to confuse those who are not intellectually adept. I merely suggest that she is not writing for them, and that perhaps their follies and whims might divert her. On the other side of the coin, I am also convinced that she has a sense of humour and would share that with those who understand it. However, I do believe that whatever the specific circumstance of that quote, she was writing for those who do not understand.
Having said that, part of her commercial outcome would have been the Lydias of this world who saw only a lurve story where big bad Mr Darcy insulted Lizzy, and haha fate makes him fall in love with her and be rejected, only to be redeemed by the power of lurve and vanquishing that nasty Mr Wickham. Like I said before, part of Austen’s genius is that this is a story that people can make sense of at many levels. Whether they see one book, or many is up to the individual.
Marks’ phrase ‘rather than being the sole construct of the author’ may have put me in mind of poststructuralism.
Anyway, I was going to say (before my brother came in and we went off to see a show), if Austen is playing a joke on readers, or even sharing in a joke with them, then doesn’t that also suggest that she intends to make them aware of their own fallibility/shared fallibilities as people? That is, that although there is not an explicit meaning in the novel, the way that Austen structures the book and the manner with which she describes her characters suggest an implicit meaning and moral, beyond the prejudices of her readers?
After all, Lizzy Bennet’s prejudices clearly mislead her, for at least the first half of the novel. Doesn’t this then suggest that the readers prejudice mislead them, too?
That sounds to me like a more than adequate moral! (Looking forward to my own prejudgments getting ripped apart in further comments!)
PS That lecture looks like great fun. Hope you get a good crowd Laura!
If I am going to deliver a lecture on L’Austen, that slut in the blue dress would do well to know that a woman’s reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful.
Another victim of the purple-eyed monster?
TimT at 23.
I agree with you that JA is making people aware of their own fallibilities. Though how many actually ‘get’ that is probably fairly few.
It can also be seen as a template of how and why prejudices form and are maintained in the face of however many facts might oppose that prejudice.
Starting off with the first sentence of the book:
“It is a truth universally accepted that a {insert recipient of prejudice here} must be {insert form of prejudice here}.” etc.
Austen’s generation, those who came of age around 1800 are really remarkable. That generation beats the shit out of the 1960s for libertarian outrageousness. And they were sexy and stylish as well. Hardly surprising we’ve got a fetish for it.
Oh how vile.
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The plebs are sullying the Baron Leigh’s most famous grand-daughter yet again with their perfectly commonplace fantasia and just look at that version of Mr Darcy. Egad! Man! He has a tan. That probably means he did a job of work sometime. Shockin’.
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Sink me. I declare I have no intention of indulging the middle-classes at play.
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Fawsells, Fawsells! Fetch my snuff poste haste! And have four footmen bring me to my carriage. Lord North’s private secretary has a son who spends seventeen hours tyin’ his cravat. I will not be outdone. Away to Paris before the bill arrives.
Err, wrong century and wrong social class, Adrien. Parody is more effective if it’s vaguely accurate!
wrong century and wrong social class
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Que? Jane Austen 1775-1817 (25 in 1800). To be sure Austen’s father was one of those scruffy bourgeois upstarts (apparently he knew how to do something other than riding horses and playing Faro. Scandalous!). But her mother was the daughter of the Leigh family (tho’ not the Baron). In fact I’m not sure there was a Baron at the time but doesn’t Baron sound better than Squire?
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And now I’m off. Old Brownstain’s arranged for us to hunt one of the butler’s children. Cheerio!
Lord North died in 1792.
Lord North died in 1792.
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Which is way before 1800 I’m sure. His private secretary’s son was a near contemporary of Austen’s and had some small influence on the times.
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And now the online poll we had to have: Who was the best Mr Darcy? -
~ flexiPoll: free online web poll ~
Sorry, Adrien, I missed the “son” bit.
Don’t know how relevant this is, but apparently were related to the Dukes of Chandos, freebooters associated with Marlborough; also Warren Hastings, the probable model for colonel what-’is-face in one of Austen’s novels ( Sense and Sensibility? ). Hastings got caught with his fingers in the till in a big way during his defacto vice regal time in India.
BTW, of little known historical concern is the story of the Bengal famine of the early seventeen seventies, that occurred in the wake of Robert Clive but before Hastings, induced by the whole sale plundering by the civilised British. Several millions died, but usually we only read of stories of brave Clive overthrowing dastardly Nawabs.
By the early nineteen forties the British, by then on the way out, still managed to create a massive famine in Bengal that also killed millions, in misappropriating rice harvests for their war effort.
But we all know, the only war crimes that occurred in WW2 involving the deaths of millions, was the jewish holocaust.
And no, am not mentioning the blood bath of the division of India in the late forties; that is a seperate issue, again. Lest there is confusion on this point.
GOD DAMN!!!!!
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My Mr Darcy Poll went bung. Obviously peaple were really annoyed. But it’s back on and it works..
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Please vote: I’m curious.