Gillian Dow

The ‘Biographical Impulse’ and Pan-European Women’s Writing

So writes the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante—the pseudonymous author of the critically acclaimed ‘Neapolitan’ series—about Jane Austen’s anonymity. In singling out Austen’s ‘choice’ to remain ‘a Lady’ on publication, Ferrante deals anachronistically with the literary marketplace in England in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. As Jennie Batchelor explores in this collection, the question of anonymity and pseudonymity is a vexed and complex one for women throughout our period: book historians in recent decades have demonstrated that anonymity was standard when Austen herself was publishing. Ferrante’s article serves rather as a passionate assertion of her own right to anonymity in the twenty-first century, and as an introduction to her own love of Austen. Even while Ferrante defends a woman writer’s right to remain unknown, her knowledge of and interest in the writer’s life intrudes when she writes of Austen’s ‘lady narrator’. In Ferrante’s words, ‘the disorderly world of the everyday—interrupts her, forcing her to hide the pages’. No matter how fully Ferrante seems to have rejected the biographical impulse in her reading of Sense and Sensibility (1811)—and her article takes in a broad sweep of classical European fiction with specific examples from Goethe and Tolstoy—with this reference, we return to the biographical commonplaces. We are back at the Austens’ home in Chawton, back to the creaking door interrupting the creative genius’ pen. We cannot un-know what we know (or what we think we know) about the woman behind the writing. Many readers, if not Ferrante herself, would not wish to: as Terry Castle wrote 20 years ago, in her infamous review of Austen’s letters edited by Deirdre Le Faye, readers of Austen’s fiction are ‘hungry for a sense of the author’s inner life’.1 And these readers still include the most hardened and dedicated of literary theorists.

Introduction: Feminisms and Futures: Women’s Writing 1660–1830

Although this collection of essays is inspired by Chawton House Library’s tenth anniversary conference, this book is not a conference proceedings. Indeed, and rather fittingly, the essays that follow emerged, like the field that is their subject, on the periphery of the main stage (which, in this case, was a marquee on the south lawn at Chawton House Library). They originated in chats in corridors and over coffee, which were followed up by conversations in other locations, at other conferences, by email and by telephone. The resulting contributions to this collection reflect on the simultaneously exciting yet disquieting feeling many of us shared in our recognition that the conversation we could and were having about eighteenth-century women’s writing in 2013 was very different from that orchestrated by its precursor event to mark Chawton House Library’s opening in 2003.

Uses of translation: the global Jane Austen

In a small room at the Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, there is a growing collection of secondary material on Austen’s life and works. In the early nineteenth century, the space was designated as ‘offices’; until 2009 (and the major renovations following the successful heritage lottery bid discussed in Chapter 7 in this collection) the room served as the museum shop. Visitors would leave Austen’s home by crossing this space, which overlooks the small courtyard and the outbuildings. Now the room has a clearly defined role, one that recognizes that books are one of the main reasons for any Austen-related pilgrimage. It is referred to as the reading room, and any visitor who would like to consult works in the collection can study there.

A model for the British fair? French women's life-writing in Britain, 1680-1830

French women’s life writing has been a fruitful topic for Anglo-American scholars. Dena Goodman’s 2009 Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters focuses on the private world of female epistolarity, eschewing a study of the published woman writer and turning instead to women who write. Goodman demonstrates convincingly that letter-writing was, for the French woman, ‘a crucial step in developing a consciousness of themselves as gendered subjects in the modern world’, life writing in which they constructed their identities through coded and revelatory exchanges with private correspondents.2 In Joan Hinde Stewart’s 2010 study of women’s letters in eighteenth-century France, her subjects are all published authors, the grandes dames of eighteenth-century French letters. Through an examination of their unpublished work — the letters of prominent writers and salonnieres Francoise de Graffigny, Marie Riccoboni and Isabelle de Charriere, and their attitude to ageing — Stewart writes a book ‘about the ways in which a group of older women claimed ownership of their lives’.3 She does not emphasize that her topic is life writing, but of course it is: Graffigny’s (1695–1758) letters are read as ‘an unparalleled source of information about the intimate organization of an eighteenth-century woman’s life’, with no detail too personal or trivial to narrate ‘neither her crystal goblets nor her satin slips, neither her debts, nor her menses’.4

WOMEN READERS IN EUROPE: READERS, WRITERS, SALONNIÈRES, 1750–1900

My dear Girls, Your parents having intrusted [sic] me with the direction of your first studies, I thought it a duty incumbent on me, to discharge it in a manner that might both instruct and amuse you. Such is the plan of the Conversations which I have translated, and now dedicate to you. That you may, one day, imitate the virtues of the mother, and walk in the steps of the daughter, is the sincere wish of, Ladies, Your affectionate friend, The Translator.