ARTICLE/EXHIBIT: At the Morgan, the Jane Austen Her Family Knew

[Ryan Goble]

EXHIBIT: A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy

WEBSITE: http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?id=22
ONLINE EXHIBITION: http://www.themorgan.org/austen/

Interesting review from the New York Times, my favorite passage in bold.

At the Morgan, the Jane Austen Her Family Knew
By Edward Rothstein
November 6, 2009

Who would not wish for a close relative like Aunt Jane? In early 1817, the year she died, suffering, perhaps, from lymphoma and beginning work on a novel she became too ill to finish, Jane Austen wrote a letter to her 8-year-old niece, Cassandra.

“Ym raed Yssac,” it begins, “I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey.”

Every word in the letter is spelled backward, from that opening New Year’s wish to her dear Cassy to the signature, “Ruoy Etanoitceffa Tnua, Enaj Netsua.” The author, here as elsewhere, does not condescend to her readers, but she also knows who they are and how to give them pleasure. Imagine an 8-year-old girl, perhaps as precocious as her aunt, playfully deciphering these good wishes.

The difficulty comes, though, in imagining Austen herself. She was such a subtle reader of her characters’ manners, so knowing about their flaws and virtues, yet herself so opaque and mysterious a presence that it is hard to imagine her in the flesh. You have to read her the way her most sentient characters read their companions, attending to subtle signs, mannerisms and language.

And for anyone who has even begun to take her measure, there may be no greater pleasure than to visit the new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy.” Like Austen’s own voice, the show is exquisitely informative while being almost laconic, displaying a wealth of material with careful explication, yet allowing the viewer to tease the writer’s sensibility out of the objects on display. The only thing out of character is a self-conscious, 16-minute documentary, “The Divine Jane,” created for the show, in which contemporary figures speak about Austen’s importance — though little that Cornel West, Fran Lebowitz or Colm Toibin have to say comes close to what the documents communicate on their own.

The curator, Declan Kiely, the head of the Morgan’s Literary and Historical Manuscripts department, along with that division’s assistant curator, Clara Drummond, had the privilege of selecting from the world’s largest institutional collection of Austen manuscripts and letters for the museum’s first Austen show in more than a quarter of a century.

Early editions of the novels are here, of course, along with period books that influenced Austen, including works by Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne and Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” An engraving by William Blake, “Portrait of Mrs. Q,” is shown, because its subject may have been the one Austen thought “excessively like” the way she imagined Jane Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.”

But the artifacts of Austen’s life intrigue the most, and since so few survive, it is astonishing how great a number are on display. Austen’s father’s library was scattered; fewer than 20 of her own books survive. One, a volume of the journal The Spectator, is here. The four novels published in her lifetime have no surviving manuscript versions (nor do two novels published posthumously). But the Morgan is showing the “only surviving complete draft of any of her novels,” “Lady Susan,” an early epistolary tale whose heroine is more Machiavellian than any schemer Austen later imagined.

Austen also wrote perhaps 3,000 letters over the course of her 41 years, most to her sister, Cassandra, who burned many and expurgated others that she believed reflected badly on Jane or other family members. Only 160 survive; the Morgan holds 51, more than any other institution. This exhibition offers a healthy sampling, some with pieces cut out in Cassandra’s quest for decorum.

These letters are still graphically dramatic, even if difficult to read. (The Morgan should provide transcriptions.) Here, in the trace of Austen’s hand, can be seen her vibrancy, fluency and discipline; the script is careful, clean, yet fast. In some letters, you can feel an almost ecstatic volubility.

Because paper was expensive, Austen typically used a single sheet, folded in half to make four pages. But when she had more to say, she would fill all usable space, then (as was sometimes the custom) turn the sheet sideways and write perpendicularly over her own script. She completed one letter here by turning it upside down and writing between the lines.

There is scarcely an elision or second thought. In 1801 Jane wrote to Cassandra: “I have now attained the true art of letter writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter.”

These are not literary constructions, designed for the archives. They are filled with gossip and trivia. But Austen’s novelistic world is so circumscribed, her dramas so domestic, that these rapid accountings of daily life almost serve as rough studies. You can feel their raw drive, an almost physical energy transformed into words.

In one of the crosshatched letters to Cassandra from 1807, for example, Jane begins by warning her sister of an “expectation of having nothing to say to you” after her last letter — they corresponded, perhaps, every three days. But then she is off and running and finally acknowledges having constructed “a Smartish Letter, considering my want of Materials.”

In another, from 1800, she confides that she must have drunk too much at a ball the night before; she danced 9 of the 12 dances, she said, and “was merely prevented from dancing the rest by the want of a partner.”

Think of that physical energy modified and controlled to conform with social propriety, adhering to the manners that she both celebrates and mocks in her fiction. That energy erupts, again and again, almost mischievously.

“Mr Waller is dead, I see,” she announces. “ I cannot grieve about it, nor perhaps can his Widow very much.”

When visiting Bath in 1799, Austen tells Cassandra of absurd trends in hats: “Flowers are very much worn, & Fruit is still more the thing. — Eliz: has a bunch of Strawberries.” But she adds, with a tone that would have been polished more witheringly in a novel: “There are likewise Almonds & raisins, French plums & Tamarinds at the Grocers, but I have never seen any of them in hats.”

Even illness has its fashions, she suggests: “Moral as well as Natural Diseases disappear in the progress of time, & new ones take their place. — Shyness & the Sweating Sickness have given way to Confidence & Paralytic complaints.”

Such observations are accompanied here by the caricatures of James Gillray, who happily skewered similar subjects, ranging from exaggerated plumes in hats to marital and musical discord. But there is always something potentially touching in Austen’s satirical musings. She signs off one long letter to Cassandra, wearying of writing: “Distribute the affecte Love of a Heart not so tired as the right hand belonging to it.”

And though Austen was very much a private person — her novels were published anonymously at first — there is also a trace here of a public world that she mostly turned her back on, as if it might crassly impinge on her novelistic universe.

In 1815 James Clarke, the chaplain and librarian to the Prince Regent (the future George IV), crudely solicits a dedication of Austen’s next novel to the Regent, who “has read & admired all your publications.” We know that the admiration was far from mutual, but “Emma” got the requested dedication anyway. Clarke, though, went further, suggesting that Austen consider a life much like his own as a novelistic subject. Her response may have been the private one of circulating a satirical outline shown here, a “Plan of a Novel,” saturated with clichés and Romantic mannerisms.

The exhibition’s documents, accompanied by the 1997 Austen biography by Claire Tomalin, almost let us glimpse the person behind the supremely knowing voice of the novels. But the challenge remains daunting. It recalls the difficulties in “Emma,” which is really a book about moral and social education, about learning how to read the inner lives of others in the outward traces on display, and then to draw appropriate conclusions. It is the kind of exploration that is best undertaken in a drawing room or on a country path. And that must have been Austen’s restless quest.

It also must have frightened some who encountered her — she might have been a terrifying aunt as well as a witty one — but with her sister, there were no backward ciphers: everything was out in the open. In one letter here, Cassandra wrote after Jane’s death in 1817: “I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed, — She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow; I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself.”