Latest news with #TheWatsons
New Statesman
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Jane Austen's subtle food commentary
W hen she was about 16, Jane Austen wrote a comic epistolary novel called Lesley Castle. The heroine, cooking for her sister's wedding, discovers 'that I had been Roasting, Broiling and Stewing both the Meat and Myself to no purpose', when her sister comes running in to say her fiancé has fractured his skull. ''Good God!' (said I) 'you don't say so? Why, what in the name of Heaven will become of all the Victuals?'' Austen is funny about food, in both senses. As if this passage was a warning to her future self about its comic absurdity, she barely lets it pass the lips of her heroines in her mature novels. The lack of domestic detail in their lives allows them to soar above the material facts of the inevitable marriage, the acquisition of responsibility for a kitchen, and what Austen described wearily as 'a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb'. References to food are, instead, artfully deployed in skewering and roasting her foolish or immoral characters. Her hints about Mrs Bennet's family dinner, Mrs Dashwood's 'presents of fish and game, and so forth', and Mr Woodhouse's basin of gruel are never to their advantage. Although her sympathetic characters might be too dignified to care about a ragout or a gooseberry tart, their world is not hermetically sealed. It is oxygenated by farming, by servants and cooks, by sugar plantations and by the embarrassment of the wrong sort of riches. Staying with their wealthy brother, Jane jokes to sister Cassandra about the luxury of drinking French wine, eating ice cream and being above 'vulgar economy'. Money rattles throughout the novels and, because Georgian society was much closer to food production than ours, that 'vulgar economy' is often about eating. Austen delicately sets up Miss Bates's genteel poverty in Emma through chat about gifts of pork and apples, so we understand that Emma's offence at the picnic on Box Hill was to humiliate the reduced Miss Bates from a position of fortune and wealth. Perhaps Austen abandoned The Watsons because the heroine's deprivations were too painfully close to her own. As Mary Crawford says in Mansfield Park, 'A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of,' because it secures the luxury of turkey and myrtle, a symbol of marriage. Most 'large incomes' came from land: an aspiration Austen shares without ignoring its vexed moralities. Elinor Dashwood's brother refuses an income for his sisters, but splurges on enclosing his land and buying out a neighbouring farmer. Yet heroes must have land; even those destined for the cloth measure their wealth by the 'living' and the food that it might produce. Scholars have pored over Fanny's account of asking her Uncle Bertram about the slave trade of the West Indies, which was met by a dead silence from the family. Austen's Georgian readers would understand that the wealth the Mansfield Park family believe elevates them above their poor little cousin, was likely to be tainted. Two decades earlier, Mary Wollstonecraft had explicitly linked sugar and slavery in her call for female equality. 'Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalise them, when principles would be a surer guard only to sweeten the cup of man?' When I wrote Dinner with Mr Darcy about food in Austen's work, the correspondence was a joyous discovery for me. Those gossipy, intimate letters with witty anecdotes about put-downs at dinners, ball suppers, her mother's skill in dairying and gardening, show a relish in the details of what the Austen family and friends were eating and how that food found its way on to the table. But it is her mature novels that have fuelled scholars and readers in the 250 years since her birth, because every slender mention is an amuse-bouche; an elegant, tiny thing that explodes with significance; the foretaste of an endlessly fascinating world-view. Pen Vogler will be giving a talk, 'Skewered and Roasted: Jane Austen as Culinary Critic', on 2 August at the Holt Bookshop in Holt, Norfolk Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe [See also: Just raise tax] Related
New York Times
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Thrilling Evidence of Jane Austen's Imagination
Visitors to the Morgan Library & Museum's new exhibition, 'A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250,' will notice that it is full of interesting personal items connected to the author. These include her turquoise and gold ring, briefly owned by the American pop star Kelly Clarkson and here on loan from Austen's house in Hampshire, England; a hand-sewn replica of a silk pelisse coat Austen is said to have worn; and a reproduction of the modest desk on which she wrote her six extraordinary novels, masterpieces of early-19th century English literature. But the show, which marks the 250th anniversary of Austen's birth, persuasively puts much of its focus on her work — what she did and how and why she did it. Providing a vigorous counterargument to the image of Austen as a retiring spinster who wrote as a kind of amusing pastime, the show uses letters, manuscripts and more to trace the trajectory of her career and illustrate how seriously she took her vocation. It's thrilling to be presented with the evidence. Here, for instance, is a tiny scrap of paper on which Austen listed the 'profits from my novels.' Here's one of three books in which she copied out some of her teenage writings — proof that she channeled her imagination into fiction, and considered how it might look in books, even as a girl. And here's a heavily emended page — full of crossed-out lines and inserted words — from an unfinished novel (posthumously published as 'The Watsons') showing Austen to be a diligent rewriter as well as a writer. 'We wanted to get the working copy in front of people because some of the myths about Austen's authorship that were promulgated after her death by family members included that she didn't care about fame, she didn't care about profit, and she didn't work hard,' said Juliette Wells, professor of literary studies at Goucher College and a co-curator, along with Dale Stinchcomb, of the exhibition. It shows how Austen's family supported her work and 'examines how it was possible for Austen to publish her now-beloved novels when women generally were not permitted to become writers,' Stinchcomb, the Morgan's curator of literary and historical manuscripts, said. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
