Literatura inglesa II.2. TEMA 1. The regency novel PDF

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TEMA 1. The Regency NovelCHARLOTTE SMITHThe melancholy of Charlotte Smith’s poems was no mere literary posture. After her father married for the second time, she herself was married off and bore a dozen children, before permanently separating from her husband because of his abusive temper, infidelit...

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TEMA 1. The Regency Novel CHARLOTTE SMITH The melancholy of Charlotte Smith’s poems was no mere literary posture. After her father married for the second time, she herself was married off and bore a dozen children, before permanently separating from her husband because of his abusive temper, infidelities, and financial irresponsibility. She began writing to make money when her husband was imprisoned for debt in 1783. Her first book, “Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays by Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park, in Sussex”, came out in 1785 and went through nine expanding editions in the following sixteen years. Beginning with the 1788 publication of “Emmeline”, Smith also enjoyed considerable success as a novelist, rapidly producing nine more novels within the decade, including “Desmond”, “The Old Manor House”, “The Banished Man”, and “The Young Philosopher”. The liberal political views espoused in these fictions made the books key contributions to the Revolution Controversy in Britain. This was also the case with her eight-hundredline blank verse poem “The Emigrants”, which both evokes the suffering endured by political refugees from France and links their plight to that of the poet herself, who as a woman has discovered the emptiness of her native land’s “boast/ of equal law”. The sonnet as a form dropped out of fashion in the eighteenth century. Its revival toward the end of that century was largely the result of Smith’s influential refashioning of the sonnet as a medium of mournful feeling. Subsequently, the connecting of feelings and nature became a central theme and strategy in Romantic poetry, especially in the genre that has come to be known as “the greater Romantic lyric”. But Smith’s engagement with nature differs from Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s in its quasiscientific insistence on the faithful rendering of detail: she addressed a sonnet to the “goddess of botany”. That closeup view of nature is rendered exquisitely in her last long poem “Beachy Head”.

MARIA EDGEWORTH Maria Edgeworth's publishing career earned her more than £11,000—an enormous sum. It also made the novel, regularly reviled by critics in the late eighteenth century, a respectable form. After 1804, the editor Francis Jeffrey attended respectfully in the pages of his Edinburgh Review to each of Edgeworth's publications, remarking on how in her hands fiction had become an edifying medium for serious ideas. Edgeworth was born in Oxfordshire on New Year's Day, 1768, the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Anna Maria Elers, who died when her daughter was five. Maria Edgeworth spent most of her childhood in fashionable boarding schools in England, until herfather, in a spirit of patriotism and optimism about social progress, decided to dedicate himself to the family estate in Ireland that had been his birthplace. In 1782 he sent for Maria to join him, his third wife, and Maria's half-brothers and half-sisters at Edgeworthstown, source of the Protestant Edgeworths' wealth since the early seventeenth century, when the property had been confiscated from a Catholic family.

For the rest of her life, that manor house in rural County Longford would remain home for Edgeworth, who in 1802 rejected a marriage proposal from a Swedish diplomat.

Brimming over with children, with books, and (it was reported) with "ingenious mechanical devices" (some of them Richard Lovell Edgeworth's inventions), this home doubled as a laboratory for her father's experiments in education, up-to-the minute agricultural techniques, and enlightened landlord-tenant relations. From the age of fourteen, Edgeworth assumed a central role in those experiments. She took up the business of estate management. She taught the younger children. At her father's prompting, she began a course of reading in political and economic theory, starting with Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Eventually Maria Edgeworth also began to write. Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), a novelistic defense of women's education, was followed by The Parent's Assistant (1796) and Practical Education (1798), treatises on pedagogy she coauthored with her father, and by the first of her influential collections of stories for children (Early Lessons, 1801). In 1800 she published Castle Rackrent, her masterpiece. Rackrent inaugurated Edgeworth's series of narratives memorializing the vanishing ways of life of rural Ireland, a project continued by Ennui (1809), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1819). Edgeworth's study of the Enlightenment social sciences is easy to trace in these regional fictions, and these concerns were a factor that helped secure their reputation among the reviewers. Not only had Edgeworth managed to associate the novel with a more intellectually prestigious discourse; by packaging her representations of Ireland's picturesque folk culture in this way, she was also able to tap the authority of a system of economic and political analysis that, in its claims to be scientifically impartial, seemed to many to offer a counterweight to the ugly prejudices that were the legacies of that nation's history of colonial conquest. The Irish Incognito is a part trickster tale from the folk tradition, part philosophical meditation on the precariousness of personal identity—also captures something of this experience of living between cultures. Starting with the first disorienting sentence, which introduces a hero who sports the ultra-English name of John Bull but who is also a native son of Cork, this treatment of cultural difference is distinguished by some slippery ironies.

JANE AUSTEN Jane Austen is the most emblematic figure of The Regency Period, from King George IV to Queen Victoria’s reign. Jane Austen spent her short, secluded life away from the spotlight. Other members of her large family appear to have lived more in the world and closer to this turbulent period’s great events than she did. Austen spent most of her life in Hampshire. Her formal education was limited to a short time at boarding school. Otherwise she and her beloved sister Cassandra had to scramble into what education they could while at home and amidst their father’s books. Jane Austen turned down a proposal of marriage in 1802. She had started writing at the age of twelve, for her family’s amusement and her own, and in 1797 began sending

work to publishers in London. At that stage they were for the most part unreceptive. She published “Sense and Sensibility” at her own expense, then “Pride and Prejudice” (1813) and “Mansfield Park”. Next came “Emma” and, posthumously, “Persuasion” and a revised version of “Northanger Abbey”. The Austen name was never publicly associated with any of these books, whose discreet title pages merely identified “a lady” as the author. The modesty of that signature is belied by the assurance of Austen’s narrative voice, the confidence with which it subjects “truth universally acknowledged” to witty critical scrutiny. The six novels are all “pictures of domestic life in country villages”. The world they depict might seem provincial and insular. For the most part the working classes are absent or present only as silent servants; the soldiers and sailors who were protecting England from Napoleon are presented mainly as welcome additions to a ball. The novels also document with striking detail how, within those country villages, the boundaries that had formerly defined the category of “the gentleman” were becoming permeable under the influence of the changes wrought by revolution and war, and how competition for social status was becoming that much fiercer. Through their heroines, readers can see how harshly the hard facts of economic life bore down on gentlewomen during this period when a lady’s security depended on her making a good marriage. The conundrum at the center of the fiction is whether such a marriage can be compatible with the independence of mind and moral integrity that Austen, cherishes. Austen also wrote so as to explore what the novel form could be and do. With striking flexibility, the new narrative voice that she introduced into novel writing shifts back and forth between a romantic point of view and an irony that reminds us of romance’s limits, that reminds us that romance features its own sort of provincialism. At the same time Austen also distanced the novel form from the didactic agenda cultivated by her many contemporaries who were convinced that the only respectable fiction was the antiromance that weaned its readers of their romantic expectations. Her delight in mocking their preachy fictions is not only evident in the parodies that she wrote in the 1790s, but is a feature of her mature novels, which as a rule conclude in ways that deviate quite flagrantly from the patterns of rewards and punishment a moralist might prefer. It can be hard to see how much her originality, her creation of characters who are both ordinary and unforgettable, her accounts of how they change, challenged her contemporaries’ expectations about novels’ plots, setting and characterization. Her dissent from those expectations is palpable in a “Plan of a Novel, According to Hints from Various Quarters”, the satire Austen wrote after “Emma”. Austen affirmed the comic spirit of all her works “to save her life and relax into laughing at myself or other people”.

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Elizabeth Bennet - The novel’s protagonist. The second daughter of Mr.

Bennet, Elizabeth is the most intelligent and sensible of the five Bennet sisters. She’s well read and quick-witted, with a tongue that occasionally proves too sharp for her own good. Her realization of Darcy’s essential goodness eventually triumphs over her

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initial prejudice against him.  Fitzwilliam Darcy - A wealthy gentleman, the master of Pemberley, and the nephew of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Though Darcy is intelligent and honest, his excess of pride causes him to look down on his social inferiors. Over the course of the novel, he tempers his class-consciousness and learns to admire and love Elizabeth for her strong character. Jane Bennet - The eldest and most beautiful Bennet sister. Jane is more  reserved and gentler than Elizabeth. The easy pleasantness with which she and Bingley interact contrasts starkly with the mutual distaste that marks the encounters between Elizabeth and Darcy. Charles Bingley - Darcy’s considerably wealthy best friend. Bingley’s purchase  of Netherfield serves as the impetus for the novel. He’s a genial, well-intentioned gentleman, whose easy-going nature contrasts with Darcy’s

initially discourteous demeanour. He is blissfully uncaring about class differences. 

Mr. Bennet - The patriarch of the Bennet family, a gentleman of modest income with five unmarried daughters. Mr. Bennet has a sarcastic, cynical sense of humour that he uses to purposefully irritate his wife. Though he loves his daughters, he often fails as a parent, preferring to withdraw from the never-ending marriage concerns of the women around him rather than offer help.

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Mrs. Bennet - Mr. Bennet’s wife, a foolish, noisy woman whose only goal in life is to see her daughters married. Because of her low breeding and often unbecoming behaviour, Mrs. Bennet often repels the very suitors whom she tries to attract for her daughters.

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George Wickham - A handsome, fortune-hunting militia officer. Wickham’s good looks and charm attract Elizabeth initially, but Darcy’s revelation about Wickham’s disreputable past clues her in to his true nature and simultaneously draws her closer to Darcy.

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Lydia Bennet - The youngest Bennet sister, she is gossipy, immature, and selfinvolved. Unlike Elizabeth, Lydia flings herself headlong into romance and ends up running off with Wickham.

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Mr. Collins - A pompous, generally idiotic clergyman who stands to inherit Mr. Bennet’s property. Mr. Collins’s own social status is nothing to brag about, but he takes great pains to let everyone and anyone know that Lady Catherine de Bourgh serves as his patroness. He’s the worst combination of snobbish and obsequious.

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Miss Bingley - Bingley’s snobbish sister. Miss Bingley bears inordinate disdain for Elizabeth’s middle-class background. Her vain attempts to garner Darcy’s attention cause Darcy to admire Elizabeth’s self-possessed character even more.

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Lady Catherine de Bourgh - A rich, bossy noblewoman; Mr. Collins’s patron and Darcy’s aunt. Lady Catherine epitomizes class snobbery, especially in her attempts to order the middle-class Elizabeth away from her well-bred nephew.

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Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner - Mrs. Bennet’s brother and his wife. The Gardiners, caring, nurturing, and full of common sense, often prove to be better parents to the Bennet daughters than Mr. Bennet and his wife.

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Charlotte Lucas - Elizabeth’s dear friend. Pragmatic where Elizabeth is romantic, and also six years older than Elizabeth, Charlotte does not view love as the most vital component of a marriage. She’s more interested in having a comfortable home. Thus, when Mr. Collins proposes, she accepts.

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Georgiana Darcy - Darcy’s sister. She is immensely pretty and just as shy. She has great skill at playing the pianoforte.

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Mary Bennet - The middle Bennet sister, bookish and pedantic. Catherine Bennet The fourth Bennet sister. Like Lydia, she is girlishly enthralled with the soldiers.

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