The Regency Years

My regional JASNA group has an book club, and our January book was The Regency Years, by Robert Morrison. It was absolutely terrific--essential reading for those of us who love Austen and Keats and history and Britain.

The book was comprehensive, explaining in easy to read, non-pedantic prose the politics and issues of the day, the social issues for all of the classes, slavery and the insidious way it infiltrated everyday life then and into the future. It had a wonderful section on the Napoleonic Wars and the part on Waterloo actually made sense having read Georgette Heyer's An Infamous Army twice. And, of course, it covered the writers and artists, celebrities, actors, and wannabes in extensive detail. I loved the section on the allure of the exotic, which finally helped me understand why the Regent's Brighton Pavilion was built and furnished as it was.

And, I absolutely loved the section on art, especially the Scottish painter David Wilkie and how his paintings are not unlike Sir Walter Scott's historical novels, and the contrast between John Constable's paintings and those of J.M.W. Turner. Now I want to get books on all three of these painters, and I might even finally read Waverly!

Below are David Wilkie's The Penny Wedding, John Constable's Wivenhoe Park, and J.M.W. Turner's Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino.

Despite exploring far-ranging topics, Morrison pulled all of the threads together to support his premise that the Regency was the bridge to modern Britain. He not only explores the impact of industrialization and how it fostered the romantic rural ideal and the tug-of-war between science and faith, but he uses Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to represent how technology and scientific advancements can be a two-edged sword, requiring society to figure out how to manage technology and not be destroyed by it.

Here are some passages that I marked as I read:

With regards to Pride and Prejudice:

When she [Elizabeth] tells him [Darcy] that she might have felt more concern in refusing him had he "behaved in a more gentleman-like manner," those words literally stagger him. They signal a powerful collision between his elitist assumptions and her bourgeois aspirations. Darcy believes that he was born a gentleman. Elizabeth hopes that someday he might become one...she ushers in the modern world, for she believes in meritocracy over aristocracy, individual preferences over dynastic alliances, and female desire over male presumption.

With regards to the Prince Regent's Brighton Pavilion:

The Pavilion is his shrine to the expertise, the originality, and the sheer bravado of his Regency, and it reveals the Oriental fantasies at the crux of the decade. Part homage and part pastiche, it is, remarkably, an Eastern structure that most spectacularly represents the British Regency.

 Lord Byron 

When Byron rated the "three great men of the nineteenth century," he placed "himself third, Napoleon second, and [Beau] Brummell first."

The picturesque

The Industrial Revolution left deep scars on rural England, but one of the most remarkable features of Regency Britain is how many areas of the countryside were virtually unaffected by it...Humphrey Repton was the premier landscape gardener of the age and an enthusiastic exponent of the picturesque, which he defined as a middle ground between the unruliness of nature and the rigidity of art.

Frankenstein

More than any other work in English literature, Frankenstein is a prophecy about the modern world. In addition to launching an entirely new genre of science fiction, it has had an incalculable impact on the way we imagine science...Frankenstein unnervingly reveals that scientific research has the potential to improve our lives in countless ways, but that if we deny or ignore our responsibilities, new discoveries have also the potential to pass dangerously far beyond the control of their makers and assume hideous and unpredictable forms that may betray or even destroy us.

Happy Equinox - To Autumn (Keats)

To Autumn

By John Keats (1795-1821)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets

Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets, by Jude Morgan, blew me away it was so good.  It's a bit of a ruse to say that it's a novel of the Romantic poets as it really is more of a novel of the women behind the Romantic poets, but that is by no means a criticism of the book.

The Romantic poets whose stories are told from the perspective of the women in their lives are Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

With regards to Byron, the leading ladies are the infamous Lady Caroline Lamb and Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh, who became as notorious as Lady Caroline when it became known that Byron was the father of at least one of her children, and his wife, Annabella Millbanke.  The latter is portrayed as the only real villain in the novel, which is a refreshingly contrary view to the usual one in which she is portrayed as victim.  Lady Caroline's voice was particularly striking--always first person, usually manic, often sad.  I got the feeling she was truly born in the wrong century.  She would have been a powerhouse in the 1990s!

Lady Caroline Lamb

With regards to Shelley, the novel begins with Mary Wollstonecraft, who died after giving birth to the woman who would become Shelley's wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (aka Mary Shelley).  Mary Shelley's step-sister, Jane/Claire Claremont is also a featured player in the Shelley domestic drama as she lived with the Shelleys almost continuously during their marriage, and she and Shelley had a closer than comfort relationship.

Mary Shelley

Finally, anyone who has seen Bright Star will thrill to know that Fanny Brawne is the sole lady around whom Keats rotates, and theirs is a truly heart-breaking story.  Although the Brawne/Keats story is but a fraction of the novel, with the bulk going to Byron (always the attention hog) and Shelley, I loved this part of the story the most.  Partly because I've loved Keats for decades and partly because their story is so poignant.

Fanny Brawne

Although I am a big fan of historical fiction, it is a rare historical fiction author who can really capture the tone, style, feeling, and sense of a timeframe and a real historical personage and make them sound true and real and not just a 21st century person in period dress.  Jude Morgan is an absolute master of the genre and I cannot praise him enough for making Byron, Shelley, Keats, Caroline, Augusta, Mary, Jane/Claire, and Fanny come to life in this novel.

What I particularly loved about this novel is that Morgan shows fully developed people, warts and all--no sugar coating here, no pandering to genius, but at the same time no denigration of the genius that clearly shone forth in the three poets and Mary Shelley.  They display the most human failings--all the seven deadly sins are there in abudance--but you can see how those failings are but a side-show to the literary work they do take seriously.

It was also very interesting to read a view of Regency England that varies so much from the Austenian world I'm used to.  For the most part, there really wasn't a place in England for Byron and Shelley considering how they wanted to live their lives. 

This book made me renew my pledge to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein this year as well as find a good bio of Mary.  I particularly liked the relationship between Mary and Byron--she might have been the one woman who didn't try to seduce him and vice versa and they seemed to really understand each other's genius to a degree that I didn't see between any of the other characters, including Mary and Shelley.  Interestingly, we never really see or hear Shelley and Byron talking to each other without one or more of their women present, nor do we see either interacting at all with Keats.  This is the story of the women, not their famous men. 

The other Jude Morgan novel that looks particularly good is The Taste of Sorrow, about the Brontes. I have yet to read a fictionalized version of the Brontes that I like so I'm hopeful given what he was able to do with Passion.

Happy Birthday, dear Jane...a gift from John Keats

I started reading Austen as a young teenager and by the time I went to college had finished my first time through the six novels, with some of them read multiple times already. When I was a sophomore in college, I took a class on John Keats poetry...that's right, one class on just Keats. I found a new favorite, and because I was still youngish and my brain was still being hardwired, I have forever linked Austen and Keats together. They were sort of the Marilyn Monroe and James Dean of the Regency artistic world. Both possessed huge talents, both were largely unknown during their life, both died relatively young (though Keats died at the heartbreakingly young age of 25), and both are now considered giants of English literature.

Keats' first poem was published in May 1816 in The Examiner. I have never read anything that suggests that Austen read this poem, and considering that she was ill from early 1816 until her death in July 1817, it's probably not likely. Nor, have I ever read that Keats read anything by Austen. Again, given her relative obscurity at the time of her death and his focus on poetry and not novels, I think it highly improbable that he did.

And yet, I believe they would have appreciated each other's work, and not just because I love both of them so much. I find it almost a tragedy that the arcs of their lives were such that they just missed each other.

Keats' deeply introspective, pastoral, and highly imaginative poetry is not unlike Austen's highly-crafted, nuanced, multi-layered stories in that both display a tension between passion and restraint, humility and talent, sense and sensibility.

And so, for my gift to Jane Austen, on this the 236th anniversary of her birthday, I give her John Keat's beautiful poem, When I Have Fears, which was written in 1818 and published posthumously in 1848. I think Austen might have been able to understand the anguish that Keats felt in frantically trying to realize his life's work before he died. I also feel that Austen might've traded her current fame for a few more years on earth. She left so much unfinished.

When I Have Fears
by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to Nothingness do sink.

In honor of Austen's birthday, I am giving away two books.

1) My own Intimations of Austen, a collection of Austen-inspired short stories.

2) Sense and Sensibility (Marvel Comics) edition, which I reviewed here.

To enter, please leave a comment and email address. For an additional entry, Tweet and let me know. I will collect all entries and do two drawings, with the first winner getting Intimations and the second winner getting S&S Marvel. This is open internationally, so comment and tweet away! Drawing ends on Thursday, December 22 at 8 pm MT.

Please visit the other 31 bloggers, authors and literature enthusiasts, who are participating in this Austen Birthday Soiree, organized by Katherine Cox of November’s Autumn & Maria Grazia of My Jane Austen Book Club.

Participants in Austen’s Birthday Soiree

Sharon Lathan
Giveaway: one copy of Miss Darcy Falls in Love

O! Beauty Unattempted
Giveaway: one copy of Letters of Love & Deception

Austenprose Giveaway: one signed copy of Jane Austen Made Me Do It

SemiTrue Stories
Giveaway: one copy of Mr. Darcy's Little Sister (open internationally)

First Draft Giveaway: one signed copy of My Jane Austen Summer and a package of Lily Berry’s Pink Rose Tea by Bingley’s, Ltd.

Regency Sketches Giveaway: one copy of I was Jane Austen's Best Friend, by Cora Harrison

Brant Flakes Giveaway: A canvas ACCORDING TO JANE tote bag and a pair of A SUMMER IN EUROPE luggage tags

Mesmered’s Blog Giveaway: one copy of Georgiana Darcy’s Diary: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice continued, by Anna Elliott

The Heroine’s Bookshelf Giveaway: Pride and Prejudice notecards, by Potter Style

vvb32 reads Giveaway: Jane Austen’s Little Instruction Book (Charming Petites), by Jane Austen, edited by Sophia Bedford-Pierce, illustrated by Mullen & Katz, introduction by Barbara Paulding

The Fiction vs. Reality Smackdown Giveaway: 2 Jane Austen candles and 2 signed copies of Definitely Not Mr. Darcy plus drink coasters and tea!

ReginaJeffers’s Blog
Giveaway: one signed copy of Christmas at Pemberley

Alyssa Goodnight Giveaway: one Jane Austen Action figure

Jane Austen in Vermont Giveaway: 2012 calendars from the Wisconsin JASNA Region

Jane Started It! Giveaway: one copy of Young Master Darcy: A Lesson in Honour, by Pamela Aidan; one set of Frederick Wentworth, Captain (Books 1 and 2), by Susan Kaye; two copies of Mercy’s Embrace: So Rough a Course (Book 1), by Laura Hile; one copy of George Knightley, Gentleman (Books 1 and 2), by Barbara Cornthwaite

Choc Lit Authors’ Corner Giveaway: one copy each of Persuade Me and The Importance of Being Emma

Reading, Writing, Working, Playing Giveaway: one copy each of Intimations of Austen and Sense & Sensibility (Marvel Illustrated)

The Jane Austen Film Club Giveaway: a copy of Northanger Abbey DVD starring Felicity Jones and JJ Feild (The winner will choose region 1 or 2 DVD)

El Salón de Té de Jane Giveaway: one copy of the Spanish edition of Sense and Sensibility and one copy of DVD package with adaptations of Jane Austen. (It’s only zone 2, but it’s in Spanish and English ), and one copy of BBC’s Emma with Romola Garai (Blue-ray)

Kaitlin Saunders Giveaway: one copy of A Modern Day Persuasion

One Literature Nut Giveaway: selection of Austenesque Reads

Patrice Sarath Giveaway: one copy of The Unexpected Miss Bennet

Jane Austen Brasil Giveaway: DVD – Sense and Sensibility (1995) – English / Portuguese subtitles

Jane Austen Sequels Giveaway: one mug with one of Jane Odiwe’s illustrations and one copy of Mr. Darcy’s Secret

Stiletto Storytime Giveaway: one copy of Noble Satyr by Lucinda Brant (Regency Romance)

Jennifer W. Becton Giveaway: one copy of the eBook of the Personages of Pride and Prejudice Collection, which contains Charlotte Collins, “Maria Lucas,” and Caroline Bingley. Open internationally.

Urban Girl Takes Vermont Giveaway: a copy of Vera Nazarian’s gift hardcover edition of her inspirational calendar and diary, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration


Pemberley Variations Giveaway: one signed copy of Mr. Darcy’s Undoing

AustenAuthors Giveaway: one copy of Georgette Heyer’s Regency World, by Jennifer Kloester

November’s Autumn Giveaway: one $10 B&N Gift-card (US only)

My Jane Austen Book Club Giveaway: A selection of Austenesque reads

Bright Star, Dim Star, Bright Star, Dim Star

Since I first learned about Jane Campion's film Bright Star,the story of John Keats's doomed relationship with his sometime muse, Fanny Brawne, I have been somewhere between ambivalent and schizophrenic about it.

One the one hand I have loved Keats poetry since I first encountered Ode on a Grecian Urn as a high school student and then chose him as an author to focus on in college, so why wouldn't I love the opportunity to see a biopic of him? Well....Becoming Jane for starters. I hate it when the genius of a favorite artist is reduced to being simply the result of thwarted love. Yes, Keats adored Fanny. Yes, she inspired some of his poetry, but there was so much more to Keats than this single infatuation followed by his untimely death from tuberculosis.

Nevertheless, I did get caught up in the excitement surrounding Bright Star in the blogosphere and read so many good reviews of it that I was first in the queue at Netflix when the DVD was released.

Did I like it? Yes and no. I thought it was brilliantly acted, lusciously filmed, gloriously costumed, and poorly scripted. I was confused. While I've read all of Keats poems, some repeatedly, and all of his letters, though quite awhile ago, I've never read a biography. I couldn't quite remember why he came to be living with Charles Brown, who the people were who rented the house to Charles Brown and Fanny's family and came to tea and offered advice, and why Charles Brown was so condescending to Fanny, was there a backstory there I didn't know about? The movie never explained any of this, nor did it explain who the young men were who raised the funds to send Keats to Rome and his death.

Since Bright Star was really only about the relationship between Keats and Fanny, I think I would have liked it better had we not had all these other characters floating about who were apparently extraneous to the story but kept getting in the way and confusing and annoying me.

To be honest, I did get caught up in the love story. But again, nit-picking, I felt a certain frustration in Keats being forever barred from marrying Fanny because he had no money. If he loved her that much, why didn't he get a job so that they could marry? Oh, yes, he was a poet and needed his musing time. I'm being facetious, but why couldn't the script have him rant even a little about having to choose poetry over Fanny because that is what he ultimately did. Instead, it seemed like Mrs. Brawne and the busy-body landlady were pulling a Lady Russell and forbidding Fanny to "marry for love." You can't live on love, even passionate love, and it bugs me that Bright Star reduces Keats's life to that simple plot line.

The absolutely best part of the movie was Ben Whishaw as Keats reciting his poetry. I would have been perfectly happy to have 2 hours of that with the pretty images of Keats/Fanny walking over the bridge, gathering flowers, pressing hands to the walls that separated them, gazing at the sky, etc.



I thought Abbie Cornish did a wonderful job as Fanny--I am predisposed not to like Fanny but she overcame my long-term prejudice against the woman who broke Keats's heart. She was a sweet sister, a dutiful daughter, a pragmatic yet romantic young woman (i.e., a nice mixture of sense and sensibility), with a feisty streak. In a way, I wish Bright Star had been more about her and how one of the world's greatest poets touched her life and heart and then was gone. I guess that's what it the movie ultimately was, but the tag line to the movie about how she walked alone for a long time after Keats died was just too sappy for me. I would have rather seen how Keats affected her--how she handled her loss. The movie should have had Keats dying in the middle and then it could have showed how Fanny dealt with it and grew up and moved on, but was still steadfast and true.

You see...I am ambivalent about this movie, to the point of rewriting it!

Bright Star vs. This Living Hand

The poem that has always characterized the John Keats/Fanny Brawne romance in my mind is not Bright Star, the title of the movie to be released in October 2009 on Keats/Brawne, but this one...

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed--see here it is--
I hold it towards you.

My understanding of the Keats/Brawne relationship is that he was infatuated and she disdainful. The movie trailer suggests that she did love him, but turned away from marriage with him for practical reasons. I never thought that was the case--I always understood that his love for her was unrequited, and This Living Hand, has an immaturity to it that speaks more of infatuation and disillusionment and anger at her indifference than anything else. There is some speculation that the person addressed in the poem is collectively the critics who were harsh towards Keats. If that is the case, then the immaturity and anger I felt the poem expressed becomes pettishness that is distasteful. I'm staying with the camp that says it was directed to Fanny.

I love Keats--his odes and sonnets are among my favorite literature of all time, but I hate to see filmmakers insist on reducing all forms of genius to Hallmark love stories. I can't buy that Keats' prowess as a poet stemmed in any way from his relationship with Fanny Brawne any more than I can buy that Jane Austen's prowess as a novelist stemmed in any way from her relationship with Tom LeFroy.

Somehow our culture has reached the conclusion that love is the only emotion that matters, and so all artists's work must be related to love. When love stories don't exist, they are created for the poor souls who apparently lived without a life-defining love story. Frankly, I think a movie about Keats's relationship with other poets who did truly shape his career would be not only more accurate but more interesting. Does every story have to be a love story?

I have yet to see Becoming Jane, though my curiousity is starting to win out over common sense. I'm not sure about Bright Star. Certainly based on the trailer, I won't like it. Fanny Brawne was not Keats's bright star or guiding light--she was a girl he mooned over and who didn't much care for him. Nor did she inspire his greatest works--it took a nightingale, an urn, and autumn to do that. Bright Star, even if it is about her, is good, but not great. This Living Hand is not even that good.

For the record, here is Bright Star:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.