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. 

 

Anglican Women Novelists: a treat in store

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Anglican Women Novelists, Barbara Pym Society, P D James, spinsters

The bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18th September by Miss Emily Wharton, a 65-year-old spinster of the parish of St Matthews in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged 10, of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared.

This, the irresistible opening sentence of A Taste for Death by P. D. James, was among the excerpts in the handout at a scintillating lecture given by Professor Alison Shell entitled ‘Anglicanism and Women Novelists: A Special Relationship’ at the Barbara Pym Society meeting in London on 7th May.

Crime and humour: these seem to be the predominant threads in Anglican fiction. Spinsters loom large … we were treated to excerpts from Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and of course Barbara Pym.

Professor Alison Shell  is currently co-editing with Judith Maltby Anglican Women Novelists which includes essays on P. D. James, Rose Macauley, Barbara Pym and others from Charlotte Bronte onwards. The good news is that it’s being published by Bloomsbury early next year, so there’s not long to wait for what sounds like a fascinating study.

Lessons from the life class

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life drawing, portraits, show don't tell rule

 

 

‘I don’t want to see anybody continuing to draw when the model has stopped posing,’ warned the art tutor. ‘Take a break and when you come back you will see your work – and all its mistakes –  with fresh eyes.’

Some anxious members of the class took no notice and went on fiddling, adding little details, trying to ‘finish the picture’, only to become muddled and wish they hadn’t.

‘You don’t need to draw every outline; the eye of the person looking at your drawing will automatically fill in the gap, will see what is suggested for themselves.’

More advice from the art tutor which tallies with writing: we can leave the reader to work something out rather than over-explaining it. What is left unsaid or barely hinted at might be as effective as what is said.

All this is probably part of the show not tell ‘rule’ which creative writing tutors are always going on about – often tediously and over-dogmatically – but it does seem to relate to visual art as well.

The third useful thing I took away from the portrait and life drawing class happened when I had to be the model. Being confronted with how other people see you might be very good for you but it is not always a confidence-boosting experience! Do I really look as grumpy/worried/distracted as that? It reminded me that what we think we are conveying in our writing may not be what other people are hearing. We can be curiously unaware of the mismatch. Have we left too many of those important gaps? This is why we are thankful if we can rely on a far-seeing and fearless critique group to point out the truth, however unpalatable it may be. Unstinting flattery in a portrait or praise for a piece of writing is very nice but it won’t help us in the long run. Look what it did for poor Anne of Cleves.

 

Reading aloud – pain and pleasure

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Barbara Pym, Eileen Atkins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Georgette Heyer, Ian Holm, Jane Austen, John Westbrook, Juliet Stevenson, Prunella Scales

Reading our own work aloud to ourselves is one of the pieces of advice handed out by creative writing tutors. At the proof-reading stage it’s an efficient way of picking up errors because it slows us down and reveals the camouflaged nasties that get missed by the skimming eye. It’s also effective for spotting all those other faults to which we can remain curiously blind – an awkwardly constructed sentence, ungraceful rhythm, accidental rhymes.

But when we read our novel aloud to other people, say in a writing group, we will inevitably include our own choice of intonation and expression to convey what we intend future readers to experience for themselves, what we as authors hear clearly in our own head. But future readers won’t have this add-on. Our written words must do all the work. Which is why it might be a very good idea to get another member to read for us. For only then will we be made aware of possible ambiguities of meaning, unconvincing dialogue, slips in point of view, confusion over who is speaking …

More work, there always is, but it could be sustained by a pleasant daydream about who we might choose should our novel ever be turned into an audiobook …  Unsurprisingly my own wishlist would include Juliet Stevenson and Eileen Atkins (marvellous at Barbara Pym novels and everything else too) and Prunella Scales (I can’t imagine another voice who so perfectly captures the wit and spirit of favourites like Jane Austen’s Emma and Elizabeth Gaskell’s  Wives and Daughters.

And then recent listening reminds me of Ian Holm’s wonderful reading of The Woman in White and for ultimate comfort when feeling tired or ill, John Westbrook provides the perfect restorative with Georgette Heyer’s The Grand Sophy …

Listening to a good novel read aloud by someone in perfect sympathy with the text: one of life’s greatest delights. Does anybody have any recommendations?

 

 

Interview with author Sarah Salway

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Alice Duer Miller, Carol Shields, Denton Welch, Gardens, Margaret Atwood, Sarah Salway

In this guest post ninevoices talks to Tunbridge Wells author Sarah Salway

First of all, tell us about what you are writing now?

I’m writing what I hope will be my fourth novel. It’s provisionally called ‘There Was Nobody There’, and is a detective story – but with a difference. It’s told over a week, and from a series of first person voices. Everyone sees a little bit of what happens but a) doesn’t realise or b) has their own reasons for keeping quiet. I was inspired by how the police put out that rather plaintive request sometimes: ‘surely someone must have seen something’! We’re all so tied up with our own lives and stories that sometimes we miss the huge things going on around us.

This is traditionally published – were you still able to choose the title and cover and other aspects of the design? What about the blurb?

Actually, this is the only novel I’ve written that hasn’t been already signed up by a publisher. Even my first was under contract to Bloomsbury before it was finished. I deliberately haven’t tried to sell this one although my agent has seen it. There’s something liberating about writing it while thinking it may never be published. It has allowed me to really play with the format and the story, although I’ve realised that I do need a deadline!

With the others it was a mixture, really. I’ve been published in both the US and the UK, and Something Beginning With was called The ABCs of Love in the States – this led to confusion with people complaining because they’d bought both thinking it was a different book. I haven’t been involved with choosing the covers of my novels – the big publishers have experts on hand so it seemed better to leave it to them. I have been involved with choosing the covers of my poetry and short story collections though, and have really enjoyed that. There’s something satisfying about getting stuck into all aspects of the book.

I love the physicality of books anyway – I’m often to be found stroking beautiful covers in bookshops!

Tell us how you first became a published writer?

I was a journalist, and studied fashion journalism at the London College of Fashion. I have worked in fashion PR, for Cosmopolitan, the Scotsman and Time Out magazine. We were living in Edinburgh when I had children, and I found a morning drop in class in creative writing. I’d always loved to read, but at school we mostly studied dead male writers so I didn’t think it was something someone like me could do. After the first class, I was hooked. I started writing short stories, and one of those stories was on the internet where it was found by my first agent who asked me if I would turn it into a novel. This became Something Beginning With, my first novel.

What have you published since?

I’ve published two more novels, Tell Me Everything and Getting the Picture, a collection of short stories, Leading the Dance, two poetry collections, You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book and Digging Up Paradise, and a collaboration of short pieces with Lynne Rees, called Messages.

How difficult is it to get your books into bookshops? Do you have to do a lot of marketing yourself?

It depends on the genre, I think. And also the publisher. I was lucky with my novels in that Bloomsbury had very strong links already, although there was one instance when my book was placed on a table right at the front of the Waterstone’s near where my father lived. He very carefully moved all the copies to the shelf under ‘S’. He was very proud of himself, so I didn’t tell him that it had actually been a coup to have been so prominently displayed! Luckily, my publishers saw the funny side.

Contemporary poetry doesn’t tend to have a big space in bookshops – I think I’ve sold more copies online and at readings.

More and more though writers are expected to do their own marketing. It’s difficult because it feels a completely different set of skills is needed from the actual writing. Many of us write because we are happy pottering around on our own, making up stories and sometimes spending days searching for the perfect sentence. The real world can be a shock – not just because you have to get dressed! I’ve often talked with other writers about forming a co-operative where we promote each other’s books – somehow that’s an easier thought than selling our own. I don’t know if this is different in other cultures, but I was always told not to talk about myself because nobody would be interested.

But then here I am… right now… talking about myself!

How do you use social media to promote yourself?

I’m a big fan of social media, but more to find out about other people, other books, other worlds than promoting myself. It works best for me when it is a conversation – I love how generous other people are. I tend to stay away from the trolls and the haters – although recently there seem to be more and more of them.

Where do you find inspiration?

What a question! All over, really. There are times when I have to consciously turn myself off because there are too many stories coming at me. I love history, strange facts, old books, snippets of conversation, people’s faces. I often have to stop myself staring but I’m sure most people don’t realise how beautiful they are. The trick, I’ve found, is to put two things together. Often I’ll get inspired by one thing but it isn’t enough to sustain a story. Add something else into the mix – especially if doesn’t immediately seem to connect – and I have a more interesting story.

Do you belong to writing organisations?

I’ve taught creative writing for many years now so I suppose I’m making my own organisation! I’m very proud of my students who have been published widely over the years, and I’m gradually curating a bookshelf of their work. As well as classes in my own home, I teach at the University of Kent’s Tonbridge centre, and with the Freestyle Yoga Project in Tunbridge Wells. I keep a list of classes and events on my website, http://www.sarahsalway.co.uk.

I have a special interest in working with groups and individuals for writing for wellbeing, and was co-founder, along with Victoria Field, of the Kent Writing and Wellbeing Network. It is now being ably run by Nicky Thompson. I’m also a member of Lapidus and National Association of Writers in Education. Part of my day job is to be the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent, and although it’s not an official organisation, we have a busy Fellows forum which I find very useful.

Which authors have influenced your writing?

There are so many, but three I’d particularly like to mention. Denton Welch was a writer from Kent who wrote so beautifully and with so much attention that he can make three pages of description about one plate completely thrilling. From him, I learnt to slow down and allow the reader to breathe. Then, one rainy holiday in a rented cottage in the Lake District, I discovered an American writer called Alice Duer Miller. She wrote in many different genres – poetry, novels, even silent movies – and I absolutely loved her sly wit and playfulness. Lastly, Carol Shields is such an elegant writer and what she does with structure blows me away. Reading her gave me a real feeling of permission. I’ve just realised I’ve nominated no living writers, so I’m going to add Margaret Atwood here too – not just because of her words but because she is always pushing the limits of what people expect her to be doing. I take courage from that.

What would you like to do next?

Last year I worked on so many projects that – although busy and stimulating – meant that I didn’t feel I was finishing anything. SO… this year I have made a resolution to work on one thing at a time. I’d like to finish my novel before doing anything else, although I have a list of things I want to do. It seems to be the way of it that when we’re working on anything for a long time, there are always ideas that seem so much better waving at us from across the desk!

I’d like to get the final draft of the novel finished by the summer though, so I can carry on with my writing blog, writerinthegarden.com. I studied garden history relatively recently and am now obsessed – there are so many stories, so many eccentric gardeners, and so many dreams involved in gardens throughout history.

www.sarahsalway.co.uk

www.writerinthegarden.com

Selfishness and Jane Austen: an irresistible competition

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Hampshire Cultural Trust, Jane Austen, Jane Austen's House Museum, Selfishness

Occasionally a short story competition comes along that gives you a thrill of creative excitement.

The competition set up by Hampshire Cultural Trust in association with Jane Austen’s House Museum is like this. Perfect for all of us who can’t get enough of our idol, even in this 200th anniversary year of her death. Aren’t we so steeped in Jane Austen that we might have a chance this time of writing something which will catch the judge’s eye?

Stories must be no more than 2017 words and respond to the quote from Mansfield Park ‘Selfishness must always be forgiven you know because there is no hope of a cure.’

One snag – the closing date is 28th February. Website: http://janeausten200.co.uk/competitions

 

Synopsis and blurb writing: is escape possible?

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blurbs, Marketing, self-publishing, synopsis

Writers struggling to write a synopsis for their novel are not short of advice. There is almost too much of it, and most of it repeats the same things. Yet we still turn to it, always hoping for that vital crutch which will somehow give us the magic touch and get the beastly time-consuming thing done.

Writing a synopsis is especially annoying because it’s not for the author – it’s for the agent, publisher or the competition judge. It’s all made worse by them each wanting something different: one page or five, single-spaced or double-spaced, the ending specified or not. And we are always going to feel that somehow our synopsis does not do justice to the novel we have written.

But the agony – if that is what it is – may have  its uses. Having to give a clear, short account of the premise, story and principal characters could help us spot weaknesses which we were previously blissfully unaware of – such as unnecessary characters, lack of tension, a flat ending. Uncomfortable moments for any author. Time for a bit of tweaking to the manuscript.

One of the joys of self-publishing is escaping the slog of writing a synopsis. But it’s only trading one thing for another. A traditional publishing firm will have experts in-house to write that vital marketing tool, the blurb. The self-published author is on her own.

There is only room for a few pungent sentences on the back of a novel. The blurb must give an instant and unequivocal explanation to the person who has picked up the book and turned it over. What kind of novel is this, what’s it about, and what’s in it for me?

This is when a blurb seems even more daunting to write than a synopsis. It’s the permanent, public face of the novel, not something that’ll happily disappear into a publishing firm’s recycling bin. Go into any bookshop and scan the blurbs of new novels, super-charged with superlatives and best-seller promise. They are sometimes rather alike but they do sound as though they have been written by an extremely talented marketing person. It’s very tempting to wish that person would do the job for us.

But perhaps the blurb we write for ourselves will be more true to our own novel, because it will convey the unique flavour of our voice, the individual way we use language. This may not dazzle the casual reader, and it may even repel some, but it will capture something that can be lost in professional blurb writing and marketing expertise, what can best be described as tone. Something that makes our book different from the rest.

 

 

 

 

Anglicanism and Women Novelists: A Special Relationship

Tags

Barbara Pym, crime fiction, P D James

 

The lecture at the 2017 May meeting of the Barbara Pym Society  in London looks like being a good one for anyone interested in the relationship between Anglicanism, women novelists and detective fiction. It’s being given by Alison Shell, a professor in the English department at University College London. She is currently co-editing Anglican Women Novelists (Bloomsbury 2018) to which she will be contributing an essay on P D James – Baroness James was an honorary  life member of the Society and a great admirer of Barbara Pym’s books.

The Barbara Pym Society website is http://www.barbara-pym.org

Self-publishing: mixed emotions

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Mary Stewart, self-publishing

 

Holding your published novel in your hands for the very first time is supposed to be a thrilling moment for an author. But the thrill is shot through with a brimming dose of alarm.

Some authors may be immune from the quaking fear that their book is, after all, a muddled affair, full of mistakes and should never have got itself printed. Learning that Mary Stewart, that brilliant writer of romantic thrillers, burst into tears when her first novel was published (see September’s post ‘Her publishers refused to pulp it’) is a great comfort. She can’t have worried about mistakes or the quality of her writing – her novels were published by Hodder & Stoughton – but even the validation of a traditional publisher wasn’t enough to overcome her dread of being exposed.

With self-publishing, the unnerving sensation of ‘putting oneself out there’ is inevitably more intense. However much valuable feedback is offered by a helpful and talented writing group, this is not the same as the confidence-giving validation of an agent and traditional publishing house. Thoughts that belong to two o’clock in the morning creep into the mind: might sympathetic, friendly groups become deluded, thinking members’ work is better than it is?

But I am still glad I have taken the plunge to self-publish my second novel Of Human Telling. I hope that it is at least good in parts, like the curate’s egg, and brings pleasure to its readers. It certainly looks and feels as nice as All Desires Known. People might even like to buy it for the cover alone, with its beautiful painting by London artist Anne-Marie Butlin.

Grammar gripes – neither is or neither are?

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grammar rules, neither, singular or plural

Most of the time we can happily ignore those little warnings on our computer screens warning us of grammar errors. All that matters is that our meaning is clear, free of all ambiguity.

But sometimes we are pulled up short. In the sentence Neither of them notice that their teenage son is facing terrors of his own or that their daughter is leading a secret life should it be notices rather than notice? Some grammar purists argue that neither should always be followed by a singular verb, but in spoken language a plural verb comes more easily …

Dithering over grammar questions is like trying one perfume after another: you lose your sense of what smells best/sounds right. Can some ‘rules’ be discarded altogether?