...I will uncover a source that I believe has been neglected in prior studies of Austen and the theatre. "with GREAT TASTE AND effect": PRIVATE READINGS, PUBLIC PERFORMANCE, AND CONVERSATION AS ART ...In the case of public speaking, Mansfield Park-always so careful on matters of education versus accomplishment-gives us some pertinent leads. The Bertram brothers' discussion of their own training in elocution includes a pointed reference to mourning over Caesar's body and reciting Hamlet's famous monologue for their father's amusement. The ability to speak clearly and with conviction was considered a key part of a young man's education.1 At Godmersham Park, owned by Edward Austen (later Knight), Thomas Sheridan's A Course of Lectures on Elocution (1762) sat in the West Case of the library shelves. Edward Ferrars's lack of taste for a public life-which depended so much on the oratory skills he did not have-can be understood further through reading works like Sheridan on elocution.
Austen may even have diverted the European novel from its enthusiasm for the historical novel as the early nineteenth century progressed: I think we sometimes forget, with our twenty-first-century ...passion for the Georgians and the Regency period, that Austen was a relentlessly contemporary observer. More important, I'm going to examine models for the female heroine in the fiction of the nineteenth century, comparing Jane Austen's heroines to those created by her contemporary, the celebrated Germaine de Staēl. I am inspired, here, by the Chawton House Library exhibition I co-curated in the summer of 2017, "Fickle Fortunes: Jane Austen and Germaine de Staēl," an online version of which appears in Persuasions On-Line (Dow and Seth). Most interesting, though, are the concerns of the rest of the poem, which are about Jane Austen's status as an unmarried woman and the truth universally acknowledged-by Kipling, at any rate-that a female literary genius, newly arrived in Paradise, must be in want of a husband. ...Staēl was a notorious European literary celebrity: on the surface, she was as far removed from the second daughter of a Hampshire-based clergyman as a woman in the period could be.
Cross‐channel exchanges in the rise of the novel in the long 18th century have become an emerging area of scholarly interest in the last decade, informed by new work on cultural exchanges and on ...translation theory, and earlier work on book history and reception studies. And yet this is an area that is yet to move beyond exceptional case studies of individual translations and translators, much less to fully articulate what is at stake for the study of the 18th‐century novel, or indeed 18th‐century studies more generally. This article traces the field from the mid‐1970s to today, arguing that the study of women writers has been central to our growing recognition that the novel was shaped by pan‐European and cross‐channel exchanges and translation. It concludes by highlighting the main threat to the field: the dearth of language‐learning. Translation – in the 18th century, and now – is thus presented as a political issue.
The plan reproduced in Nigel Nicholson's Godmersham Park, Kent: Before, During and After Jane Austen's Time shows it as the north-facing room at the bottom left, one wall entirely windows and-if the ...plan is to scale, which we cannot take for granted-the largest room in the house (20-21). ...what Louisa describes-and very entertainingly at that-is a hunting, fishing, and shooting kind of a family, who love outdoor activities of all kinds. ...in 1878 she joined her niece Cassandra Hill, living out her final years in Ireland. Louisa Lushington describes Marianne in 1821, just as she has taken on the responsibility of being mistress of Godmersham Park on the marriage of her elder sister, Fanny: Miss Knight, the eldest unmarried daughter is about nineteen & has management of the family, table etc. she is very pretty in every way, face, and figure, large hazel eyes, pretty nose, very small mouth, a good complexion with a good deal of colour, her face is rather round than oval, and she has very pretty brown hair, dark eye-brows, and eye lashes.
Between 1795 and 1830, the French author Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis (1746-1830) published a large number of historical novels that were popular Europe-wide and translated into many languages, ...including English. Although French historical novels such as Germaine de Staël's Delphine (1802) and Chateaubriand's Atala (1801) have attracted the attention of Anglo-American Romanticists in the twentieth century, Genlis's similar works have been neglected. And yet in her own age, her novels were more widely read in Britain, and thus formed an important part of the Romantic literary landscape. They influenced British writers and readers, and received lengthy reviews in literary journals and periodicals. Using a wide range of sources in both French and English, this article investigates the reception of Genlis's historical novels in England. It rejects the opinion held by other scholars that these works were mere potboilers, written from a position of penury, reliant on the earlier romances of Madeleine de Scudéry and other précieuses of the seventeenth century, and conservative in the extreme. Instead, it argues-through a reading of Genlis's bio-bibliograpical survey De l'influence des femmes sur la littérature française (1811)-that Genlis's studies of "le grand siècle" of Louis XIV (which included Mademoiselle de Clermont 1802, La Duchesse de La Vallière 1804 and Madame de Maintenon 1806) are about more than simple nostalgia for the Ancien Régime. It demonstrates that Genlis's work engaged directly with Romantic gender politics, implicitly critiqued the position of women under Napoleon, and inspired female readers and writers across Europe.
