Tea at Trianon: Jane Austen at School

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Jane Austen at School

From Madame Gilflurt's blog:

Some Austen biographers suggest that the girls’ parents scraped together the money to send them to this larger, more well-established school for the express purpose of acquiring genteel “accomplishments” considered desirable on the marriage market. If so, it may well have been a shrewd initiative, given that Cassandra and Jane would have no money of their own, sharply limiting their appeal in a world where such deficiencies mattered.

Off they went to the Abbey School in Reading, twenty miles away, presided over by one Sarah Hackitt, a cheerful, gossipy woman sporting a mysterious cork leg, who despite the fact she was neither French nor spoke French dubbed herself “Madame La Tournelle” — thus lending her little school a certain fashionable cachet.

What do we know about this interval in young Jane’s life? How are we to think of it? And what was most urgent to me, in working with the illustrator of Young Jane Austen, was how to visually present Jane’s experience at the Abbey School in a single evocative image.

Jane herself is silent on the subject, aside from a glancing remark in a letter to Cassandra, ten years after the event: “I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school.”

In her mature work as a writer — at a safe remove from the experience — she would issue some scathing little comments about girls’ schools; we come across them in Emma and in Sense and Sensibility. (Read more.)