Sanditon – ‘I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again’

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Andrew Davies, Another Lady, Georgette Heyer, Marie Dobbs, Mr Woodhouse, Sanditon

In rereading Jane Austen, we are able to experience something of that age of elegance which too often eludes us in the twentieth century. We are unrepentant about this form of escapism and turn to her six novels for relaxation… Like Mr Woodhouse, we enjoy the company of these old friends best; and though we prefer their actual company to secondhand discussions and speculations about them, anything concerning them will always hold a fascination for us…. writes Another Lady AKA Marie Dobbs.

In her An Apology from the Collaborator, included at the end of Jane Austen’s Sanditon completed by Another Lady published in 1975, Marie Dobbs admits that she offers her version for our sheer enjoyment, aware that Jane Austen’s language, integrity and meticulous technique cannot be faithfully copied.

She was too hard on herself. Marie Dobbs’ completed Sanditon is peppered with delightful passages poking fun at human vanity and folly, which feel as though they could be written by Jane Austen herself. The Miss Beauforts… were certainly no longer content to remain on their balcony now these two personable young men were to be perceived strolling about admiring the Sanditon views. Indeed, they felt a definite obligation to improve the landscape for them immediately by dotting graceful feminine silhouettes wherever they be most visible. The very next day Miss Letitia carried her easel out of doors and began moving it from sand to shingle, from hill to Terrace with tireless and unselfish activity. No concern for completing her own sketches interfered with her sense of duty to adorn whatever vista might require her presence.

There is some splendid Austen-ish dialogue too, as in this speech from Reginald Catton, one of the only two on-stage characters added by Marie Dobbs: ‘So that was Miss Denham! Predatory female – Sidney warned me. He said I would not be in the least danger from anyone else – could handle all the Miss Beauforts with ease – but Miss Denham would be hanging about me forever if once she caught sight of my barouche. I told the groom to keep it well out of sight in the stables.’ 

Reginald Catton may also remind fans of Georgette Heyer of her comic young men about town, such as Ferdy Fakenham in Friday’s Child. Marie Dobbs makes the hero Sidney Parker resemble the witty, charming, teasing Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, but in his unassuming kind-heartedness there are echoes of Georgette Heyer’s endearing Freddy in Cotillion. The later developments of the plot come close to Heyer regency romances too – no problem for those of us who love both authors, as we must suspect Marie Dobbs did  – but perhaps some literary critics might argue that Jane Austen was intending to take a different and sharper line.

It’s difficult not to feel disappointment that Andrew Davies’ recent television adaptation of Sanditon didn’t follow the story and tone of the Another Lady/Marie Dobbs completed version. In the eleven chapters Jane Austen wrote before illness stopped her in March 1817, she set up everything we love in her other novels and Marie Dobbs fulfils the sparkling early promise with grace, respect and humour. Added to this we have in Sanditon a merciless satire of hypochondriacs and medical quackery, speaking to us all the more poignantly when we remember that Jane Austen was only four months away from her death on 18th July.

But as the ever-so-sensible heroine Charlotte says to the would-be seducer Sir Edward who has read more sentimental novels than agreed with him: ‘our taste in novels is not at all the same.’ Nor is our taste in television adaptations all the same, and this is probably a very good thing.

The most hateful character in fiction?

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Fanny Price, George Eliot, Gilbert Osmond, Grandcourt, Gwendolen Harleth, hateful fictional characters, Henry James, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Mrs Norris, The Portrait of a Lady

‘Make your nasty characters ten times nastier,’ advised the creative writing tutor. ‘Readers want strong definition so exaggerate the light and dark.’

She had a point. Even if you aren’t writing crime novels, it’s no good running away from the evil side of human nature. But it’s July 18th, the day that Jane Austen died 201 years ago, and I found myself remembering the careful subtlety of the unpleasant characters in her novels, such as Mrs Ferrars, Lucy Steele, General Tilney, Mrs Norris. Jane Austen never goes over the top.

If asked who we hate most, many of us would probably opt for Mrs Norris, the horrible aunt in Mansfield Park, because of the way she bullies Fanny Price, the terrified little girl taken away from her own family and Portsmouth home to live with her grand relations. Her vindictive spite continues to find fresh expression in the years that follow, but it’s the abuse of a defenceless child that we can’t forgive. Mrs Norris is both loathsome and entirely convincing: we know her. If Jane Austen had overdone Mrs Norris’ awfulness, she might have slid into a caricature and become less real.

Re-reading Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, I could see the same elegant restraint in the portrayal of the corrupt and manipulative Gilbert Osmond. We shiver because we see the trap Isabel has walked into, but it is not until chapter 42 that we know what she is suffering: ‘… it was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one … under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers.’  Her real offence ‘was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his – attached to his own …’

In my mind, Gilbert Osmond and the sadistic, chilling Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, husband of Gwendolen in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (described in the ninevoices post Emotional abuse from a monster husband – and a complex fascinating heroine)  now tie for first place as the most hateful men in literature, while Mrs Norris is still without a serious female rival. But this is perhaps from a sheltered and limited viewpoint. What other fictional characters do we fear and hate?

 

Not a ‘horribly good’ heroine

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Cynthia Kirkpatrick, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Mrs Gibson, Wives and Daughters

‘I am not good and I never shall be now… I might be a heroine still…’

Cynthia Kirkpatrick is not the heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Wives and Daughters but some modern readers may think she deserves to be.

Elizabeth Gaskell brought up four daughters in a happy, high-principled family home. In her portrayal of the sweet-natured, truth-telling Molly Gibson, the actual heroine of this last unfinished novel published in 1866, she writes with all the realism and delicate perception of a good and wise mother. But while it is impossible not to love Molly, it is Cynthia, the daughter of a bad and neglectful mother, who is somehow more interesting and arguably Elizabeth Gaskell’s finest creation.

Patricia Beer, in her study of the women characters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot Reader, I Married Him writes that ‘Cynthia is perhaps the least hypocritical girl, and the one with the most self-knowledge, that we meet before the twentieth-century novel.’ It’s this that gives her so much appeal to modern readers, who may not always relate to Molly’s struggles to be good when presented with a truly appalling stepmother.

‘Cynthia was very beautiful, and was so well aware of this fact that she had forgotten to care about it; no one with such loveliness ever appeared so little conscious of it.’ We see her being the perfect companion and guest: ‘She exerted herself just as much to charm the two Miss Brownings as she would have done to delight Osborne Hamley, or any other young heir. That is to say, she used no exertion, but simply followed her own nature, which was to attract every one of those she was thrown amongst.’

Cynthia is the daughter of another splendid creation, the widowed Hyacinth, tired of having to earn her own living:  ‘How pleasant it would be to have a husband once more; someone who would work while she sat at her elegant ease in a prettily furnished drawing room, and she was rapidly investing this imaginary breadwinner with the form and features of the country surgeon.’ Mr Gibson, anxious to provide his daughter Molly with a suitable stepmother, falls into the trap set for him.

The new Mrs Gibson, caring only for her own comfort, has been a lazy mother to her own child Cynthia. She sent her away to school at four years old to be out of the way; not wanting to be outshone on her wedding day to Mr Gibson she even cunningly arranges for Cynthia to be kept in France. ‘If there is one thing that revolts me, it is duplicity,’ she asserts, but her selfish neglect of her daughter has meant that Cynthia too has a mercurial relationship with the truth.

It is Cynthia’s recognition that she does not love her mother – this at a time when filial love and duty were part of Victorian thinking – and her apparent careless acceptance of the damage that has been done to her which give her character its modern flavour and conviction. As she says to her stepsister Molly, to whom she is a loving and sympathetic listener ‘But don’t you see I have grown up outside the pale of duty and “oughts”. Love me as I am, sweet one, for I shall never be better.’

Cynthia’s disarming self-knowledge contrasts sharply with that of her mother, who has none at all: ‘I never think of myself, and am really the most forgiving person in the world, in forgiving slights.’ When speculating about the advantages of the possible death of the heir to an estate, Mrs Gibson insists ‘I should think myself wanting in strength of mind if I could not look forward to the consequences of death. I really think we are commanded to do so somewhere in the Bible or the Prayerbook.’

‘Do you look forward to the consequences of my death, Mamma?’ – Cynthia’s barbs, always directed at her mother, provide much of the comedy in the novel, much as do the exchanges between Mr and Mrs Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. But there is a greater depth of seriousness and pathos in Elizabeth Gaskell’s examination of relationships between mother and child or husband and wife. Mrs Gibson’s futile attempts to win back her husband’s esteem after he has discovered her shallow self-seeking deceit not only stir the kind-hearted Molly into pity, but also the reader. Mrs Gaskell is careful too not to reduce her to the level of caricature – whereas Mrs Bennet comes perilously close – by small details; we learn that Mrs Gibson was always good to the poor.

‘I wish I could love people as you do, Molly!’ Cynthia knows what she is and what is likely to become of her. She escapes into what an earlier or sterner morality might call worldliness – though Elizabeth Gaskell does not make this judgment – but what nowadays we see as the fun and pleasure that life may have on offer.

Cynthia’s need is to be always admired, and relies on ‘all the unconscious ways she possessed by instinct of tickling the vanity of men.’ But these men mustn’t find her out. ‘I try not to care which I dare say is really the worst of all, but I could worry myself to death if I once took to serious thinking.’ ‘I don’t like people of deep feelings… I’m not worth his caring for’. Her eventual choice shows her understanding of her own inability to commit herself to anyone who wants too much from her or sees the flaws behind the fascinating created self she displays to the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jane Austen’s husbands: why do clever men marry silly women?

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Charlotte Palmer, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Lady Middleton, Miss Bingley, Mr Darcy, Mrs Allen, Mrs Bennet, Mrs Gibson, silly wives, Wives and Daughters

‘Men of sense do not want silly wives’ says the wonderfully sensible Mr Knightley, that infinitely dependable hero whom everybody in Highbury – and Jane Austen’s readers – know to be an infallible guide. But who is really speaking here? Is Jane Austen having a secret laugh with us behind Mr Knightley’s back? After all, his own brother, astute and perceptive as he is shown to be, has married Emma’s sister Isabella who ‘was not a woman of strong understanding or any quickness.’

Clever men have a habit of marrying silly women in Jane Austen novels. Not that they mean to; it’s as if Jane Austen observed from life that sensible, rational men can be remarkably stupid in matters of the heart. Mr Bennet married without taking the trouble to discover that underneath the sexual attractions of youth and beauty his wife was ‘a woman of mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper.’ Not really a man of sense then, one can’t help thinking.

Mr Palmer has fallen into the same trap: ‘through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman’. Is the ironic inclusion of the word ‘unaccountable’ Jane Austen having another sly laugh at men?

A woman’s appearance is almost always what initially attracts and matters most to Jane Austen’s men. Even Mr Darcy, who we suspect has thought much on the subject, says of Elizabeth ‘she is not handsome enough to tempt me’, before eyeing her up and down and deciding that her ‘figure is light and pleasing’.

Sometimes even the possession of beauty or sex appeal doesn’t explain why silly women secure men of sense as husbands. ‘Mrs Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at their being any men in the world who could like them enough to marry them. She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment nor manner.’ But this excessively boring woman who talks of nothing but her gowns has still managed to get a husband. Jane Austen’s explanation is simple and sarcastic enough. ‘The air of a gentlewoman, a great deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible, intelligent man like Mr Allen.’

So how do these men of sense conduct themselves when they realise that while they may not have wanted a silly wife, they have got one by mistake? Honourably it appears, though Jane Austen is not in the business of writing explicitly about extra marital forays. Mr Bennet, we are told, ‘was not of a disposition to seek comfort, for the disappointment which his own imprudence had brought on in any of the pleasures which too often console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice. He was fond of the country and of books; and from these tastes had arisen his principal enjoyments’.

Reading offers itself as an escape. Mr Bennet shuts himself up in his library; Mr Palmer buries himself in the newspaper: Lady Middleton, snobbish and less amiable than her sister Charlotte but equally vacuous ‘exerted herself to ask Mr Palmer if there was any news in the paper. “No, none at all,” he replied and read on.’

Silly women in Jane Austen novels do not care for reading. It is quite impossible to picture Mrs Bennet holding a book. Lady Middleton dislikes the Dashwood girls because they are well-read. Miss Bingley pretends to read, but only picks up a book because it is the second volume of the one Darcy is reading. Characters who don’t read are shown to be ill-educated and superficial; Mr Darcy may sound intolerably condescending when he pronounces that a lady should improve her mind by extensive reading, but it is clear that Jane Austen is generally in agreement with this principle, even if she can’t resist poking fun at its unfortunate effects in Mary Bennet.

These men of sense who marry silly women may resort to grumpy rudeness (Mr Palmer) or ridicule and mockery (Mr Bennet) or playing at cards (Mr Allen) but Jane Austen largely ignores any serious unhappiness in their marriages. As for the wives, silliness and good temper sometimes offers its own protection. Charlotte Palmer, pretty and giggling, prattles away, her sheen of stupidity sealing her off from the consciousness of what is going through her husband’s head.

In Jane Austen’s day marriage was the necessary goal for women, and understandably enough they had to use every weapon they possessed to achieve it. ‘My aunt Philips wants you so to get husbands, you can’t think’ – Mrs Bennet, Charlotte Palmer and Mrs Allen succeeded in this at any rate, so you could say they have the last laugh.

Jane Austen is careful to show us these disappointed husbands being thoughtful to other characters if not to their wives. But there is a touch of cruelty in her suggestion that stupid women deserve all they get or are too thick to have real feelings, and should be regarded as mere figures of fun. Although Elizabeth Bennet knows that her father’s treatment of her mother is ‘reprehensible’, as readers we are encouraged to forget about this in our enjoyment of his wit.

These unequal marriages give us some of the funniest scenes in Jane Austen’s novels. If we want a more sombre, serious  look at the regret suffered by a man of sense marrying in haste we have to wait for Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters with its brilliant creation of Mrs Gibson  – but that penetrating combination of comedy and tragedy deserves a post of its own.

Emotional abuse from a monster husband – and a complex fascinating heroine

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Daniel Deronda, Dorothea, George Eliot, Gwendolen Harleth, Jane Austen, Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Romola Garai

If Elizabeth Bennet is classic literature’s most delightful heroine, Gwendolen Harleth might claim to be its most compelling, and not only because she may – or may not – be guilty of murder.

‘Some readers of this history will doubtless regard it as incredible that people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that a bachelor of good fortune and possibilities was coming within reach …’ here is the sentence in chapter five of Daniel Deronda in which George Eliot nods to the famous opening of Pride and Prejudice.

George Eliot’s admiration for Jane Austen was profound and dated back to her first falling in love with the philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes; his 1852 essay The Lady Novelists in the Westminster Review praised Austen’s novels as ‘like an actual experience of life’. For him, and for George Eliot too, Jane Austen was ‘the most truthful, charming, humorous, pure-minded, quick-witted and unexaggerated of writers’.

But the rewritten sentence in Daniel Deronda is heavy with irony and extends to some ten lines of philosophical observation about human nature. George Eliot never did anything by halves and this may be part of the reason why Gwendolen Harleth, and the 800 page novel she dominates, is not as well known as such a richly complex creation deserves.

For Grandcourt, the ‘handsome lizard’ whom Gwendolen marries to escape becoming a governess, is no Mr Bingley. Early in the novel we see him baiting one of his dogs; we know from that chilling moment how he will treat Gwendolen when he has her in his power.

Unlike Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice who marries Mr Collins with her eyes open, being both sensible and realistic about her prospects and with the strength of character to live within them, Gwendolen is a spoiled child who makes the fatal mistake of thinking she can marry Grandcourt and go on doing just what she likes.

Jane Austen doesn’t condemn Charlotte Lucas for doing what was common among women of her time, and George Eliot makes the reader feel that Gwendolen has no real choice but to rescue herself and her family from degrading poverty. But Charlotte isn’t taking what belongs to someone else. Gwendolen’s real crime is in knowingly betraying another woman and breaking a promise. Punishment for this lack of loyalty to her own sex will come on her wedding night.

Although we already know what Gwendolen is capable of when something gets in her way, whether she could have actually saved Grandcourt from drowning is left uncertain. Murderous thoughts in women towards the men who are controlling or abusing them was something that interested George Eliot, and crops up several times; even the noble-minded Dorothea in Middlemarch comes close to violence when Casaubon repulses her after he’s learnt that his illness is serious. And Gwendolen has none of the religious ardour and passionate desire for the welfare of others which ultimately governs Dorothea.

George Eliot sets her characters against a vast panoramic view of humanity and world progress, in contrast to Jane Austen’s much-quoted choice of ‘three or four families in a country village’. It is perhaps because of the extraordinary magnetism of Gwendolen Harleth as a heroine for our time that Andrew Davies in his 2002 BBC television series of Daniel Deronda concentrated on her story, rather than the other theme of the novel which paints the vast sweep of the Jewish faith and seeds of Zionism. George Eliot purists might regret the decision, but the production was certainly perfect in its faultless casting and acting: Hugh Bonneville, Hugh Dancy, Jodhi May, Edward Fox, Greta Scacchi, David Bamber, Celia Imrie, Amanda Root – and above all Romola Garai with her riveting performance as Gwendolen, this most fascinating and ambiguous of heroines.

 

 

 

Mr Collins and Mr Elton – our favourite Jane Austen clergymen?

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clergymen, Jane Austen, Mr Collins, Mr Elton

John Henry Newman – before he left the Church of England to embrace Roman Catholicism – criticised Jane Austen for her failure to understand what being a priest meant. He was not alone. Both in her own time and since, Christians from both high and low church persuasions have found fault with Jane Austen for depicting the clergy in a less than flattering light and thereby bringing the church into disrepute.

A sense of humour failure or missing something? Jane Austen was a devout Anglican all her life. She was private about her faith, and not much given to talking about it or making her characters be any more expressive. But serious Christianity is there in her novels all the time, it’s the air the characters breathe, something understood. Wanting Jane Austen to be more explicit is wanting her to be a very different kind of author.

Her intentions and choices were essentially literary; she was not trying to make a point. The clergymen in her novels are never villains, nor are they based on anyone she knew. She merely invites us to laugh along with Elizabeth Bennet at ‘follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies’ in people of all sorts, clergymen included.

In half of Jane Austen’s six finished novels the hero is a clergyman (Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park); in three the heroine is a daughter of a clergyman (Northanger Abbey and the two unfinished novels Sanditon and The Watsons).

Jane Austen certainly knew a vast number of clergymen. Her father was the rector of Stevenage in Hampshire; her brother James was a clergyman; in her letters there are references to over ninety of them. Clergymen were everywhere in society, and at a time of war they were particularly in demand.

But how the profession was viewed, who entered it, and why they did so, was very different to today. Some sixty per cent of graduates from Oxford and Cambridge went into the church, apparently accepting that being a clergyman was a job rather than a vocation. The scholarly range was wide; neither a degree in theology nor any training was required.

Young men of genteel birth but no income had only three available choices of profession: the military, the law, or the church. Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility ‘prefers the church’ but this doesn’t appear to be for especially religious reasons. When his snooty mother thinks this isn’t grand enough for him, idleness seems to be the only alternative.

The livings of almost half the parishes in England and Wales lay in the gift of landowners; this was therefore an ideal way of providing for younger sons – as Sir Thomas Bertram does for Edmund in Mansfield Park. Vicars paid the salaries of their often poverty-stricken curates, sometimes leaving a curate in charge while holding another living elsewhere. As we see with Charles Hayter in Persuasion, without a parish, marriage and a decent standard of living were impossible, and without a patron or connection with a bishop, it was difficult to obtain one. But while pluralism and patronage, together with the way the Church of England was structured, may have opened the way for abuse and worldliness among the clergy, Jane Austen doesn’t criticise the system; she was more interested in illustrating how human beings behave within it.

Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice is a caricature of the greedy clergyman greasing up to his patron, a stock figure of comedy recognisable to Jane Austen’s contemporaries. The clergy in her day were not necessarily expected to be above the ordinary material concerns and weaknesses of other human beings – and it’s in this way that she writes of them. They were food for wit and amusement alongside everyone else in society; as Jane Austen tells us in Northanger Abbey, the novelist must convey ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature’ and ‘the happiest delineation of its varieties.’

That other most repellent clergyman, Mr Elton, is less of a figure of fun than Mr Collins. Becoming a clergyman was a way of social climbing at that time, and Mr Elton’s background is trade. In Highbury he can enter the small circle of gentry and seek to better himself by marriage within it. This would have been seen as natural enough by Jane Austen, if not by Emma. According to Mr Knightley (with whom one cannot possibly disagree) he is ‘a very respectable vicar of Highbury’ and known to perform his clerical duties efficiently and to visit the poor. His only real crime is his cruel behaviour to Harriet.

The formal duties of a parish priest at that time were two services on Sundays, a communion once a month, and baptisms, weddings and funerals. Although there was the extra work of glebe land and the often troublesome business of tithe collecting, in most of the novels there is a sense that the clergy have plenty of time to indulge in pleasurable pursuits the same as other gentlemen. Henry Tilney, whilst clearly a young man of high principle and religious conviction, is able to abandon his parish for weeks on end to attend balls in Bath. Mr Elton takes himself off to secure the appalling Augusta without anyone thinking he is neglecting his calling.

It is not until Mansfield Park, the most overtly religious of her novels, that Jane Austen examines the role of the clergy in any depth. For all Sir Thomas Bertram’s deficiencies as a father, he can think rightly on other matters: ‘a parish has wants and claims which can be known only by a clergyman constantly resident … human nature needs more lessons than a weekly sermon can convey; and that if he does not live among his parishioners, and prove himself, by constant attention, their well-wisher and their friend, he does very little either for their good or his own.’

The pleasure-seeking, wrong-thinking Mary Crawford considers that the clergy are a self-indulgent waste of space – not altogether surprising given that she is daily witnessing her brother-in-law Dr Grant’s obsession with the food on his plate. It is through the arguments between her and Edmund Bertram that a spiritual dimension enters into the writing and will eventually become essential to the plot. Edmund insists ‘I cannot call that situation nothing, which has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally – which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which result from their influence.’

Edmund is presented as an almost perfect clergyman in spite of his occasional lapses of judgment, though we have to hope he is less obtuse with his parishioners than he was with Fanny at the height of his love for Mary. Jane Austen knew that good men are not always as perceptive as they ought to be. Edward Ferrars, too, will no doubt develop more gumption with the strong-minded Elinor beside him in the parish. The scintillating Henry Tilney, by standing up to his avaricious bully of a father, proves that he is not just extremely attractive and entertaining, but that Christian principles thoroughly govern his conduct.

Yet while we acknowledge the undoubted virtue and excellence of these three clergymen heroes, it has to be admitted that it’s Mr Collins and Mr Elton in whom we take the most enduring delight. It’s 200 years today since Jane Austen died: a good moment to feel endlessly thankful for such delicious and unforgettable characters. 

 

Fine Work

©We have to thank the Jane Austen House Museum at Chawton (the only house in which Jane Austen lived and wrote which is open to the public) for allowing us to reproduce this image of our favourite author’s own handiwork, which the British Library currently has on loan from them. 

How do you work out your plots? Develop character? Decide how to effectively bring lovers together in a satisfying way?

Staring at a blank screen or sheet of paper can be more frustrating than inspirational. Instead, some of us develop our fiction while doing the family ironing (several gruesome murders in Herefordshire came about this way), others use a Labrador tugging at the extremity of a smart leather lead. I frequently nudge my subconscious into activity by dead-heading roses or measuring out the ingredients for a lemon drizzle cake.

One feels that Jane Austen knew the value of displacement activity instinctively. As an accomplished needlewoman, who made her own caps and no doubt her everyday gowns, she spent some of her leisure hours creating embroidered gifts for family and friends. The above photo is of a simple paper needle case stitched for her niece, Louisa. Did quiet time with her needle also help her decide that Lydia’s elopement would provide a satisfactorily scandalous derailment of the burgeoning romance between Elizabeth and Darcy? Did Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s insufferable arrogance simmer into being while Jane Austen frowned over the inflexibity of a back stitch? Darcy’s ungentlemanly proposal speech evolve over a peppering of French knots?

It is a delight to discover yet another of Jane Austen’s talents. Her perfectly constructed novels are like Savile Row tailoring. Pieces of story carefully selected and shaped to marry into an elegant whole. One creative art perhaps enhancing another. Maybe I should unearth that unfinished (and sadly amateurish) piece of tapestry from the attic…

We’d love to know how you distract yourself into creativity.

The Jane Austen House Museum, is, of course, an essential visit. They now own and have on display her gold and turquoise ring which was saved from leaving the country in 2014.

Austen House