open up the study of early women writers by beginning a journal and compiling encyclopedias before editing the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, and Jane Austen. She has worked in English departments in Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK. A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she is now an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish and Newnham Colleges and an Emerita Professor of the University of Aberdeen.
Todd applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Living with Jane Austen, and reported the following:
This is part of page 99 where I look at Jane Austen as a letter writer, mainly to her beloved sister Cassandra , her other self, as she calls her:Visit Janet Todd's website.I have become a fan of Jane Austen’s letters, mischievous portmanteau accounts of a life filled with people – some too fat, some too short-necked, some just too nondescript for comment – and random things, from muslins and sofas to honey, cakes and wine. The letters are unpredictable, skipping from lace collars to a brace of pheasants, from ale to ailments. Austen displays in herself those little grievances we all have as duty bangs against desire, but she never stays long in irritable mode. Soon, she’s off and away to green shoes or missing gloves.Page 99 occurs in the chapter called ‘Poor Nerves’. It is part of the section on Jane Austen and the body, the next chapter being labelled ‘The Unruly Body’. In ‘Poor Nerves’ I describe my joy in reading Jane’s letters meant only for her sister’s eyes—or sometimes the eyes of other close family members and friends—but not for ours in the 21st century. Where the novels are the result of careful revision and rewriting, these letters are spontaneous and undoctored. Jane Austen is thrifty with paper, so there’s little question of her jettisoning first attempts; in one letter she chides herself for not writing a smaller hand so that she could get more on to her single page. Paper and postage are expensive.
The letters are captivating, with their spurts of excited or tremulous life. A niece has a ‘purple Pelisse’; it may be a secret but not kept well enough to avoid the snooping of an aunt in the bedroom acting like a naughty, middle-aged Catherine Morland poking around Northanger Abbey. Not much escapes this aunt, not much is unrecorded. She’s eager to share the most enticing trivialities.
In the quotation above, the interweaving of my personal response to Austen’s writing and more distanced critical comment is typical of the book as a whole, although elsewhere I provide more background historical and literary material. This includes detail on Regency houses, on the fashionable way of looking at external nature, on contemporary responses to money and the making of money, on the uneasiness over girls’ education and manners in a changing world--and on the anxiety over ailments that result from a seeming interaction of mind and body.
For this topic I put Jane Austen in the context of other writers worried about physical ailments. In this context, her attitude in novels and letters can often seem bracing, sometimes less than sympathetic! She shows how often headaches and nervous diseases result from emotions like jealousy or self-pity; instead of running to physical remedies—many of which, such as bloodletting with leeches and drinking concoctions including mercury, would have worsened the problem—she advises exercise and a change of scene. As so often, there’s much useful advice in Jane Austen--though she never presses it on you!
Austen’s ‘global’ fame means that many people know her from the films and many spinoffs and dramatisations rather than her writings. I hope that my book might draw readers back to the wonderful novels—and that they will share my enduring enthusiasm, and be challenged by some of my unorthodox ideas. (Did Cassandra burn most of Jane’s letters?)
--Marshal Zeringue
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