30 JANUARY, 2015

Cassandra Austen’s Drawings of English Royalty for Teenage Jane Austen’s Parodic History of England

By: Maria Popova

“By a partial, prejudiced & ignorant Historian.”

“At fifteen, she had few illusions about other people and none about herself,” Virginia Woolf once wrote of Jane Austen. Indeed, the future author of Sense and Sensibility was an early master of dispelling cultural illusions through parody, satire, and general wryness. In 1791, decades before she offered writing advice to her own teenage niece, fifteen-year-old Austen penned The History of England — a short manuscript of 34 pages, subtitled “By a partial, prejudiced & ignorant Historian,” featuring thirteen ink-and-watercolor drawings of English royalty by Austen’s sister, Cassandra. (Austen was not the only prominent writer with an artistically gifted, lesser-known sibling — Virginia Woolf’s sister was the prominent Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell, who illustrated some of Woolf’s work, and Jorge Luis Borges’s sister, Norah Borges, was one of the female pioneers of modern art.)

A play on Oliver Goldsmith’s 1764 classic of the same title, Austen’s book was a parody of the general trend toward reducing history to mere trivia and educational factlets designed for quick, easy digestion — in other words, a proto-parody of the listicle, Austen’s contempt for which one can only imagine.

Young Jane had a similar distaste for the reduction of complex stories into simple facts, another favorite trope of contemporary media. Her outrage over history’s demolition of nuance and dimension began in her marginalia on the pages of Goldsmith’s history. Next to a passage about the Stuart family, she scoffed in pencil: “A family who were always ill used Betrayed or neglected — whose virtues are seldom allowed while their errors are never forgotten.”

After Austen’s death in 1817, Cassandra kept her manuscripts until her own death in 1845. For more than a century thereafter, the notebooks were nearly forgotten and quietly made their way down the family tree, until they ended up in the hands of Cassandra’s great-granddaughter’s niece, who sold them at Sotheby’s in July of 1977. The British Library purchased the notebooks and Austen’s parodic history was published in facsimile for the first time as Jane Austen’s The History of England (public library), including all of the original drawings.

Cassandra’s depictions of English royalty parallel her sister’s parodic tone — there is a lumberjackish Henry VIII, a hipsterly bedraggled Henry VII, and a witchlike Elizabeth I.

Complement Jane Austen’s The History of England with the author’s advice on writing and some delectable recipes inspired by her novels, then revisit Queen Victoria’s own drawings and Virginia Woolf’s quirky family newspaper, illustrated by her teenage nephews.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

16 DECEMBER, 2014

Jane Austen’s Advice on Writing, in Letters to Her Teenage Niece

By: Maria Popova

Epistles on the fine art of “speeding truth into the world.”

Despite being one of the most important writers our civilization ever produced, on whose labors humanity continues to feed, Jane Austen (December 16, 1775–July 18, 1817) left hardly any record of her opinions and theories on the craft she so masterfully wielded in practice. But a close reading of Jane Austen’s Letters (public library) reveals, here and there, little glimpses of the beloved author’s stylistic convictions — a fine, if modest, addition to this ongoing archive of notable wisdom on writing.

In one 1808 letter to her sister Cassandra, 33-year-old Austen admires a short piece by the English cricketer William Deedes, a friend of Cassandra’s — a glimpse of what she believes makes a good writer:

He has certainly great merit as a writer; he does ample justice to his subject, and without being diffuse is clear and correct… He certainly has a very pleasing way of winding up a whole, and speeding truth into the world.

In another letter from February of 1813, Austen recounts an atypically disappointing work by the English novelist, diarist, and playwright Frances “Fanny” Burney — whose writing Austen generally enjoyed and admired, and whose 1782 novel Cecilia heavily influenced the final pages of Pride and Prejudice — and offers a critique of its shortcomings:

The work is rather too light and bright and sparkling: it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story… something that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style.

But her most explicit counsel on writing comes from a series of letters to her teenage niece, Anna. In August of 1814, 17-year-old Anna asked Austen for feedback on the novel she was writing, under the working title Which Is the Heroine — a title Austen liked “very well” and anticipated to “grow to like it very much in time.” Upon receiving the initial manuscript, Austen writes:

My dear Anna,—I am very much obliged to you for sending your MS. It has entertained me extremely; indeed all of us. I read it aloud to your grandmamma and Aunt Cass, and we were all very much pleased. The spirit does not droop at all.

Austen proceeds to comment on each of Anna’s characters and offers the first of a series of concretely rooted, generally extensible criticisms:

I do not like a lover speaking in the 3rd person; it is too much like the part of Lord Overtley, and I think it not natural.

In the same letter, Austen offers a warm disclaimer to her criticism — “If you think differently, however, you need not mind me.” — but a month later, having immersed herself in the book more thoroughly, she takes off the auntly hat and dons the writerly one. She readies Anna for some tough love:

Anna,—We have been very much amused by your three books, but I have a good many criticisms to make, more than you will like.

After complimenting a number of the girl’s characters and offering her take on the ideal length of a novel — roughly six times Anna’s first section of the novel, or a total of 288 pages — Austen makes a case against the abuses of clichéd phrases:

I have only taken the liberty of expunging one phrase of his which would not be allowable,—”Bless my heart!” It is too familiar and inelegant.

Though herself a master of detail, Austen cautions against overly precious particularities:

You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand and left.

She encourages the girl to focus on the relationships between the characters against a well-crafted backdrop of place:

You are now collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life. Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on, and I hope you will do a great deal more, and make full use of them while they are so very favorably arranged.

Toward the end of the letter, Austen makes a remark at first blush amusing in the context of today’s thriving young-adult genre, then rather sad coming from a woman revolutionizing literature from within the patriarchy, and finally reluctantly sage given the general fate of female characters in canon of literature:

You are but now coming to the heart and beauty of your story. Until the heroine grows up the fun must be imperfect… One does not care for girls until they are grown up.

Although one never sees Anna’s letters to Austen — Cassandra had many of her sister’s letters destroyed after her death — it seems like the shaky confidence of the aspiring writer was rattled rather vigorously, for her aunt sent the following assurance a few months later:

My dear Anna,—I have been very far from finding your book an evil, I assure you. I read it immediately and with great pleasure.

Anna never finished her novel. But when Austen died less than three years later, the young woman inherited her aunt’s unfinished manuscript of Sanditon and later became the first writer to attempt completing it. In 1869, she collaborated with her half-brother, James Edward Austen-Leigh, on A Memoir of Jane Austen — the first major biography of their famous aunt and the primary one for decades after its publication, eclipsed only by Jan Fergus’s 1991 biography Jane Austen: A Literary Life.

Couple Jane Austen’s Letters with this year’s finest biographies, memoirs, and history books.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

25 FEBRUARY, 2014

Dinner with Mr. Darcy: Recipes from Jane Austen’s Novels and Letters

By: Maria Popova

Mr. Bingley’s white soup, Lady Middleton’s apricot marmalade, Margaret Dods’s pigeon pie, and more literary treats from Georgian England.

As a hopeless lover of imaginative cookbooks, especially ones with a literary or art bend — from homages like The Alice in Wonderland Cookbook and Modern Art Desserts to conceptual masterpieces like The Futurist Cookbook to actual recipes by Alexandre Dumas, Andy Warhol, Liberace, George Orwell, and Alice B. Toklas, and especially The Artists & Writers’ Cookbook — I was delighted to come across Dinner with Mr. Darcy (public library) — a collection of recipes inspired by the novels and letters of Jane Austen, conceived and compiled by Penguin Great Food series editor Pen Vogler.

From Mr. Bingley’s white soup in Pride and Prejudice to Aunt Norris’s lavish and prolific jellies in Mansfield Park to the everyday edibles Austen discussed in her letters to her sister Cassandra, the recipes capture both the spirit of the era and Austen’s singular sense and sensibility in creating an atmosphere through food.

One recipe comes from Martha Lloyd, Austen’s longtime friend and eventual sister-in-law, who lived with the Austen sisters for the final decade and a half of the author’s life. Lloyd kept a small “household book,” included in which were a number of recipes. One entry reads:

Pease [sic] Soup

Take two quarts of pease. Boil them to a pulp. Strain them. Put ½ lb of butter into a saucepan. Celery, half an onion, and stew them til tender. Then put two anchovies, powdered pepper, salt, mint and parsley (each a small handful) and spinach, and heat of each a small quantity. Half a spoonful of sugar. The soup be boiled as thick as you like it and the whole be ground together, boiled up and dished.

Vogler adapts the recipe into a contemporary version, featuring proper spelling and the use of a blender:

FRESH PEA SOUP

Pea soup was an Austen family favorite: Jane wrote that she was not ashamed to invite an unexpected guest to “our elegant entertainment” of “pease-soup, a spare rib and a pudding” (letter to Cassandra, December 1, 1798.) This was a perfect way of using up the older peas from the garden to produce a fresh, vividly colored soup.

2 celery sticks, finely chopped
1 onion, finely chopped
Scant ½ stick (50g) butter
Few springs of mint and parsley, chopped
3 anchovies or 6–8 anchovy fillets, chopped
Freshly ground white pepper
4 cups (500g) frozen or fresh peas
Generous 1 quart (1 liter) light vegetable or chicken stock
Pinch of sugar
4–5 good handfuls of spinach (you could use lettuce and/or chopped cucumber instead of the spinach)

1. Gently cook the celery and the onion in butter until it is soft but not browned, then add the mint, parsley, and anchovy, grind in a little white pepper, and cook for a few minutes.
2. Stir the peas into the mixture, add the stock and a good pinch of sugar, and simmer for 10 minutes.
3. Add the spinach (or lettuce and/or cucumber) at the end of the cooking time, and cook for a few minutes more. Let it cool, then whizz with a blender. This gives a nice grainy texture, but push it through a sieve if you would like a smooth soup in the Georgian manner. Reheat gently to serve.

Another recipe surmises where Austen’s jam fancies may have come from and turns to The Experienced English Housekeeper, a popular 1769 book by Elizabeth Raffled. Vogler adapts Raffled’s recipe thusly:

APRICOT MARMALADE AND APRICOT “CAKES”

Lady Middleton successfully deploys “apricot marmalade” (which we would now call jam) to stop her daughter’s attention-seeking screams. The apricot cakes are made from thick purée, which is dried in the oven to make delicious, chewy sweets.

Makes 2 quarts (2 liters)

18 oz (500g) fresh apricots or dried apricots, reconstituted overnight in apple juice
1 ¼ cups (250g) preserving sugar for marmalade
1 ¾ cups (350g) preserving sugar for cakes

1. Pit the fruit and boil it until tender — about 30 minutes. Then rub through a sieve or purée in a blender, stir in the sugar and bring back to a boil. Boil until the sugar has dissolved.
2. To make apricot cakes, spoon the mixture into oiled muffin cups and smooth down. Leave in a very low oven, 175°F (80°C) to dry out for 5–6 hours, turning them over halfway.

Another recipe cooks up one of England’s most popular specialties from that era:

PIGEON PIE

It was the custom to put “nicely cleaned” pigeon feet in the crust to label the contents (although sensible Margaret Dods says “we confess we see little use and no beauty in the practice”). Georgian recipes for pigeon pie called for whole birds, but I’ve suggested stewing the birds first, so your guests don’t have to pick out the bones.

Serves 6–8 as part of a picnic spread

4 rashers of streaky bacon, chopped
Slice of lean ham, chopped
4 pigeons with their livers tucked inside (the livers are hard to come by, but worth hunting out)
Flour, seasoned with salt and pepper
9 oz (250g) steak, diced (original cooks would have used rump steak, but you could use something cheaper like topside, diced across the grain of the meat)
Butter
Olive oil
Finely chopped parsley
2 white onions, roughly chopped
A bouquet garni of any of the following, tied together: thyme, parsley, marjoram, winter savory, a bay leaf
Beurre manie made with about 2 tsp butter and 2 tsp flour
1 lb (500g) rough puff pastry, chilled
Optional additions: 1 onion, peeled and quartered; 2 carrots, roughly chopped; 1 celery stick, roughly chopped

1. Brown the bacon and then the ham in a frying pan, then add the onions, if using, and cook until they are translucent. Transfer the mixture to a large saucepan
2. Flour the pigeons well and brown them all over in butter and olive oil in a frying pan, transferring them to the same large saucepan. Flour and brown the steak in the same way
3. Put the pigeons in a saucepan, and push the steak, bacon, and onions down all around them (choose a saucepan in which they will be quite tightly packed). Although the original recipe doesn’t include them, you may want to add the carrots and celery stick to improve the stock.

   Add approximately 1 ¼ cups (300ml) water, or enough to just cover the contents. Cover the pan, and simmer slowly until the meat comes off the pigeon bones — at least an hour.

   Do not allow the pan to come to a boil or the beef will toughen. Remove from the heat.

4. When it is cool enough to handle, remove the steak and pigeons with a slotted spoon, and carefully pull the pigeon meat off the bones, keeping it as chunky as possible, and put it, with the livers from the cavity, with the steak. You should have a good thick sauce; if it is too thin, stir in the beurre manie a little at a time.

   Wait for it to cook the flour, and thicken before adding any more, until you have the right consistency.

5. Preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C). Roll out two-thirds of the pastry and line a pie dish about 3 inches/8cm deep, keeping a good ¼ inch (5mm) of pastry above the lip of the dish to allow for shrinkage
6. Prick the bottom of the pastry and bake blind for 12 minutes. Add the meat mixture and pour in enough gravy to come to within an inch of the top.

   Roll out the remaining pastry to cover the top, crimping the edges together. Make a vent in the center, and use the trimmings to decorate.

   You may like to use the point of the knife to make small slash marks in the shape of pigeon footprints — a nod to the “nicely cleaned feet” of the original recipe. Bake for 25–30 minutes until the pastry is lightly golden, and cooked through

7. To serve, this is a juicier pie than we are used to for picnics, so you will need plates, and knives and forks, in the Georgian manner

Dinner with Mr. Darcy contains many more edible delights inspired by the beloved author’s life and literature. Complement it with some recipes inspired by Lewis Carroll.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

19 DECEMBER, 2013

Jane Austen on Creative Integrity

By: Maria Popova

How to defend your creative vision against commercial pressure with graciousness, honor, and unflinching conviction.

“Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in,” beloved Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson famously admonished in his speech on creative integrity. “Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.”

In December of 1815, Jane Austen released her novel Emma (free download), followed closely by a second edition of her controversial 1814 novel Mansfield Park (free download) — the last two novels published during her lifetime. The former sold well, but the latter was a commercial failure — so much so that it nearly absorbed all of Austen’s profits from Emma. In the spring of 1816, less than a year before her death, she received a letter from Mr. Clarke, chaplain and private English secretary to Prince Leopold and the librarian at His Royal Highness’s Coburg House, who had come to admire Austen’s talents but also wanted to steer them in a certain direction. He suggested that “a historical romance illustrative of the august House of Coburg would just now be very interesting” — essentially a request for a publicity puff piece that would be at once more commercially successful for her and politically beneficial for the Prince. (A proposition tragically prescient and familiar amidst our day and age of churnalism and clickbait vacant of substance.) But in a letter from April 1 that year, found in A Memoir of Jane Austen (public library; public domain), the celebrated author stands her ground with equal parts integrity and elegance, articulating the supremacy of the creative impulse over the allure of commercial success and capturing the very essence of why writers write:

My dear Sir,

I am honoured by the Prince’s thanks and very much obliged to yourself for the kind manner in which you mention the work…. You are very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe-Coburg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

I remain, my dear Sir,
  Your very much obliged,
    and very sincere friend,
  J. Austen.

During that time, Austen had begun to write her final novel, which she titled The Elliots. She completed the draft mere months after her letter to Clarke. But she never lived to see it published, succumbing to fatal illness in July of 1817. It was posthumously published under the title Persuasion (free download) six months later.

A Memoir of Jane Austen, written by Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh and originally published in 1869, is excellent in its entirety, offering an unprecedented, highly influential first-hand account of the elusive icon’s character and habits, and painting a dimensional portrait of the author whom Virginia Woolf called “the most perfect artist among women.”

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.