Embarking On A Course of Study

Austen Overload in a Good Way - 19th Century Cultural Arts Program at Johns Hopkins' Evergreen

 Well the universe does certainly answer one's call! Since getting back to this project I got my first JASNA newsletter which had a blurb about the Chawton House Fellowship given to a member for a project/study at Chawton Library over the summer (doesn't have to be academic - woo hoo!), there's the Austen conference, and now the Evergreen House at Johns Hopkins is having a cavalcade of events related to 19th Century culture and arts, including a day of dancing, fencing, food, etc. this Saturday, the 26th.

But wait, there's more!

There's an exhibit:

Privileged Pursuits: Cultural Refinement in Early Baltimore

February 4, 2011–April 17, 2011

In the early 1800s, music, dance, literature, fine art, and civility were thought to be a part of a complete education. Homewood Museum's sixth annual student-curated focus show explores how young Baltimoreans were instructed in these and other cultural refinements This student-curated focus show explores how young Baltimoreans were introduced to these and other cultural refinements through parental instruction, printed materials, tutors, and specialized schools. Evidence has been drawn from Carroll family correspondence, rare books, and other period items. An accompanying display located on the main level of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, adjacent to Homewood Museum, features objects from the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries.

Poetry:

Emergence of American Voices: Early 19th-Century Poetry: March 26, 5pm reception, 5:30pm reading / Presented by faculty and students of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars / $8, FREE for Members and JHU students.

And a festival!

Festival of Historic Arts: April 10, 12–3:30pm / Learn an old-fashioned skill or art as it may have been practiced in 1800s Baltimore / FREE with paid museum admission

There was also a painting class, but it was early Feb and I missed it.

The list of events and registration info here:

JHU Evergreen House - 19th Century Doings

What an awesome spring this will be! If you're local - check out these events.

 

Two Sets Forward, Three Heys Back; New Austen Biography, Juliette Wells Follow Up

Boy am I sucking with regard to this blog lately. Sorry. I've been focusing on my writing - both my novel (doing final edit, very slowly, and adding some scenes), and my poems (revising 8-10 of them and sending them out, which takes forever, as the lit mags are super picky about their guidelines - exhausting). Plus meeting with both my fiction and poetry critique groups. These are all good things, but haven't left much time for reading and blogging.

So here I am catching up again!

I went to another English Country Dance (ECD) at St. Mark's Church on Monday.It's been two months since the class I organized at the Baltimore Hostel and the ECD I went to the next night at St  Mark's. Boy did I suck there too. I was okay for the first two dances, but in the next few, ended up at places in the set where I and my partner were standing out, so we didn't get to do the practice at the start of the dance. I don't know about you but I learn by doing not watching, so without that practice, I was chaos in heels (well, not really, I was in flats, but you know what I mean).

I know it shouldn't have frustrated me because it was all in good fun - and it is fun and the people are so lovely and patient and encouraging - but I was frustrated. The snowstorms kept me from going back in February and then, as mentioned, I was working on my writing in March, so now I have to try to make more of a regular effort. I have plans to go back in two weeks.

It was the 'heys' that got me. I really got totally lost in them. This is the figure in which you cross and recross the other members of your group in the set. Your group can be four or six people. Sometimes you cross once in a square, sometimes you go down the set a few people and back. Sometimes both! If I had stood in the center of the set and people had spun me as they went past I couldn't have been more disoriented.

But, as mentioned, everyone was so nice about it, and my partners especially. At the end several other men came up to tell me they'd ask me to dance next time (I always leave at the break, which is about 9:15 pm, because of work the next day). So sweet. I just can't say enough about what a great group of people you'll meet at an ECD!

I also finished Sanditon, The Watsons, and Lady Susan (of the three, only Lady Susan is complete, the others are unfinished) and enjoyed Lady Susan the most. I read that a theater in NYC is staging a reading of it as a fundraiser on April 12th, but can't handle another trip to NYC so I'll have to miss. It's wonderfully irreverent and witty and lively. Lady Susanhas a marvelous voice and is deliciously wicked. A voice Austen never returned to (except maybe a little dabble via Mary Crawford). Maybe it was just too nasty and she felt she didn't want to get sucked in to that. I find that so interesting after all the murders, infidelities, and scandals reported to take place in her juvenalia.

The Watsons was of little interest to me, though I enjoyed the heroine. Her family was dreadful, I could see Fanny Price returning to Portsmouth and being confronted by the poor manners of her family in this story. And the level of detail about one dance - before and after! Not as interesting for this reader as it was for the characters, in my opinion. It didn't feel as polished as her other works. I'm sure scholars find much to dissect in this and the other works but, again, I'm not a scholar.

Sanditon was sort of a mix of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion for me, in terms of tone. Charlotte Heywood seems very much like Catherine Morland, but there's not enough of her for me to connect with her, or any other character. They just didn't feel as substantial as in P&P and S&S. The similarity to Persuasion, for me, was in the location - the seaside, and the number of characters all coming together in this little village. And now, I have to say, maybe a bit of Mansfield Park, as the Earl and his sister seem a bit like the Crawfords.

I am now halfway through the Claire Tomalin biography. There's a new one out, by the way, here's the interview with the author, Claire Harman, on NPR. It's called Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World. (Yes, Linda Wertheimer does actually say 'gothic-ee.' Hmmm.) 

 

Now, as promised, let me catch up on my meeting with Juliette Wells.

Juliette is on the left.  :)

Here is a link to the podcastof her talk at Goucher:

Let me just say that I really need to work on this interviewing business. I ended up getting us into too chatty of a place about the books and Marianne and love of Austen  and not enough focus on real questions.

A reminder that she's writing about how Austen has been appropriated by popular culture. So we ended up talking about that and all the books out there, many of which you have surely read! 

Books like:

Jane Austen's Guide to Dating

A Walk With Jane Austen

Dating Mr. Darcy

Dear Jane Austen

What Jane Austen Taught Me About Life and Love

Tarot of Jane Austen (seriously! I don't have that one)

She asked me my favorite Austen novel (Persuasion), and told me that's the thinking person's Austen, which made me happy. By the way, this not being your favorite doesn't mean you're a non-thinker!

And we discussed Marianne and Elinor a bit. She asked me if I thought Marianne had compromised herself in marrying Col. Brandon - she's modeling herself on Elinor, sacrificing her romantic and creative sides (creative - music playing, which she doesn't do after Willoughby, despite what the movies show you). After rereading the book, I was reminded that the text does say that Marianne was a reward for all Col. Brandon had suffered. Much as I adore him myself, that's not very positive. And Marianne grows to love him. Also not quite what one would wish.

And what of Elinor, who is tested time and time again throughout the book? Juliette said that Austen needs people to be like Elinor, using sense to rule emotions. But, for us, a balance between the two sisters is better and more sensible.

We discussed my project and that's when she told me about the 18th century practice of reading for moral improvement. Fiction was included in the reading list as long as the characters were admirable and the story worthwhile, if it expressed good principles. The main characters need to experience a moment of humiliation and then a a thorough self-examination and self-reproof for bad behavior.

This is what made me realize I'm doing the project as a pilgrimage to the self as well as a plundering of the self.

We discussed the Chawton Fellowship and she encouraged me to contact them to inquire about my project, and then I let her go. It was her last day at Goucher and I didn't want to take up any more than a half hour of her time.

For more of her articles go here.

I greatly appreciate her time and her serious consideration of my project and its questions. If you have the chance to hear her speak, please go! And keep checking Amazon for her book - maybe next year.

Now it's time to go through the novels and my notebooks and make the Marianne Reading List once and for all. I will, of course, start with Cowper.

Good to be back!

Dancing!

This is my third attempt to post pics from the WONDERFUL English County Dance Lesson this past Sunday. Typepad keeps freaking out and freezing. Weird.

I can't say enough about how much fun this was. 18 people showed up, 3 of whom were from the Baltimore Folk Music Society (to help guide us along). The venue was the 19th Century ballroom of the Baltimore Hostel (www.baltimorehostel.org), which was gorgeous and perfect. And our caller was fantastic - Michael Barraclough (www.michaelbarraclough.com). He was a great teacher and paced us well, going back over steps we clearly weren't getting as many times as we needed, which was exactly what I wanted for the lesson. He also gave us a Power Point presentation on country dancing in England, Scotland, and the US, with a slide that showed what steps we would learn that evening. Awesome.

By the second dance, I looked down the set and everyone was getting it! We still messed up - that always happens - even to the most experienced - but nobody cared. It was a group with great spirit and humor and we laughed and laughed. I think some people caught the bug!

The following night, I went to the dance at St. Mark's Church in Pikesville (see the link to the folk music society in the right hand bar below the books I'm reading for info if you're in the area and interested) and was much better at processing the calls and flowing with the dance than I was the first time I went back in September. It clicked, though I still messed up royally during one dance. I managed the other four quite well!

So here are some pics - a little blurry as my camera doesn't handle action photos well. You get the idea!

  
 

The Jane Austen Handbook - How to Become an Accomplished Young Lady

Jane is smiling on me - she led me to this book:

The Jane Austen Handbook: A Sensible Yet Elegant Guide to Her World by Margaret C. Sullivan.

With such fab info as:

How to Identify "The Quality"

How to Ensure a Good Yearly Income

How to Elope to Scotland

How to Get Rid of Unwanted Guests

How to Converse With Your Dancing Partner

Most important for our purposes: How to Become an Accomplished Young Lady.

In her intro she writes:

"We will not scold you for wanting to understand entailments and wedding clothes and the delicate politics of the ballroom. (Because it does rather bring fantasy to a screeching halt to realize one is not familiar with the intricacies of, say, paying a morning call.) We will instead undertake to explain the mysteries of life among early nineteenth-century British landed gentry--mysteries Jane Austen, writing for an audience of her contemporaries, did not find mysterious at all. Here are step-by-step instructions that will allow one to conduct one's fantasy life with perfect aplomb--or at least to better understand the background when Lizzy or Emma or Elinor or Catherine or Fanny or Anne are faced with a similar situation in the novel or films."

I love doing things with aplomb.

I've ordered a few more books that I will reveal when they arrive as a clever new idea has occurred to me that I will share with you in a few days. Appropriately, at the turn of the new year.
  

Austenolatry: Happy Birthday Jane! More Musings and Update on Country Dancing Class

From The Writer's Almanac today:

It's the birthday of Jane Austen, (books by this author) born in Hampshire, England (1775). She published her books anonymously; the byline stated that the book was by "a Lady." Not many people read her books while she was alive, though among her small devoted readership, her novels were highly esteemed. She died in 1817. Five decades later, in 1869, her nephew published A Memoir of Jane Austen, and his book spawned widespread interest in Austen, which led to the reprinting of her novels. It also touched off a sort of mania for Austen in the 1880s, known as "Austenolatry." It wasn't until the 1940s — more than 100 years after she had died — that Austen's work became the focus of large volumes of academic scholarship.

Today members of Jane Austen Societies all over the world are celebrating her birthday with a tea or luncheon. There are lots of groups devoted to her work and thousands of people who call themselves "Janeites." In the U.S., "Janeites" likely belong to JASNA, the Jane Austen Society of North America, founded 30 years ago, in 1979, with its first meeting at the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan.

JASNA holds a yearly meeting in a North American city, a three-day event that's somewhere between a scholarly conference and jovial literary happy hour. There's a theme chosen for the meeting. This past October, the meeting was in Philadelphia, and titled "Jane Austen's Brothers and Sisters in the City of Brotherly Love." There's lots of dancing (English country dancing, mostly) and there are Box Hill-style picnics, modeled after the one in Austen's novel Emma.

Austen said, "A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of."

And, "Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance."

____________________________________________________

I'm pretty behind on posting - so many things to write about.

Briefly, let's just say how much I am enjoying rereading Northanger Abbey. The first few times I read it, I think it was right after reading P&P or S&S and I was still steeped in all the (I was going to say romance, but Austen doesn't really do romance) push and pull, hopes and dreams, of the characters' road to marriage (let's go with that), so I was frustrated with the satire and play and narrator's voice in the book at times - because I wanted it to be another P&P or S&S or Persuasion.

Well, it's a rollicking good time now and I can appreciate it for all its charms and cleverness. It's the one book where Jane's voice speaks to you directly and it's a fun dialogue. Her wit is beyond compare! She really goes full force, no holds barred. Awesome.

It's gotten me thinking how much of her characters' character, and whether they take the high road or low and end up where they want to go, is tied to books. Books have power - whether read or written (women created some measure of independence - money - through writing) - and they make or break the character and her future. The wrong ones give you the wrong ideas and make you the wrong fit (and wrong-headed) for the partner who could have been right otherwise. I've mentioned this before, but I'll say it again. The heroines who do well are the ones with self-command, self-awareness, and the power of self-examination. The ones that follow (to the greater degree) the rules of propriety, and who have a handle on their emotions, go the furthest.

This is something many women are not taught today, as young girls. Yes, as children, we knew about behaving at the dinner table and in malls, etc., but I'm pretty sure my friends and I never heard word one about dealing with/managing our emotions (fears, worries, even joys), so they didn't rule us. And self-examination? What??? Who heard of that as a teenager or young adult, when you needed it most?

With all the silly (ok - STUPID) magazines we read - Tiger Beat, Seventeen, Mademoiselle, Cosmo - that were all about dressing and making oneself up for a man and making him feel important, forgetting about what was inside us and making ourselves feel good first, we didn't stand a chance. And then it became all about career - women 'having it all.' Always looking outside, not inside for ways to manage our lives. Media in general was not (and still isn't) responsible in how it communicates with young women. And most of our parents didn't know how to help themselves let alone us.

There's been a big resurgence of self-help books, classes, and videos geared towards teaching women how to relate to men, how to get what they want from men, how to meet the right one and marry him. Think Bridget Jones' Diary. But it's even larger now. Being 43 and single, I get targeted for these kinds of ads/info on the Internet. There's a huge industry with audio, video, books, teleconferences, soulmate kits, vedic astrology readings, and more.

It's really boomed since The Secret came out and the masses learned about The Law of Attraction on Oprah. It's a new (and very commercial - because that's what we Americans do best) version of the 'how tos' that Austen's characters (the sensible ones) demonstrate for us.

And guess what? It's all about self-examination, self-awareness, and self-command. That's the good news. It's still about reading the right books, which is still a minefield experience. That's the bad.

Let me 'share' that about 13 years ago I had an anxiety disorder that lasted for several years (panic attacks and everything, good times), and that taught me those three skills. It forced me, more like, but I hadn't known or seen their necessity in my life to that point, so that's what it took for me to wake up, apparently! I'm grateful that it happened as it was a major turning point in my life and a constant reminder to keep up those practices. It's not an experience you forget. Still, would have been easier to have had good examples in life and books instead....

So what do you think? How were you raised? Who were your examples/models of womanhood? Do you regularly take stock of your feelings and behavior and adjust where needed? Do you put yourself first (not thinking selfish here, there's a difference), take care of yourself? I'd love to hear.

_____________________________________________________

To close, here are pics of the Baltimore Hostel, a renovated 19th Century mansion where the country dancing class will be held on a Sunday afternoon in late January. Probably late enough in the day that we can have those chandeliers lit up and some candles. Woo hoo!

We'll be moving miscellaneous furniture in the ballroom (which is now, technically, a lounge) to the other end of the room. We can fit about 12 couples in a set. 

Enjoy Jane's birthday!
 
 

Maple Morris Dancing and Jane Austen

A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of seeing a demonstration of Maple Morris dancing.

From the website: www.maplemorris.com:

"Morris dancing is a surviving English traditional folk dance that has been performed since the 1400s and has been associated with seasonal and harvest rituals. The dance is vigorous and athletic and the high leaps are accented by the use of white handkerchiefs and bells strapped to the legs."

Morris Daning is a form of dancing Austen would have seen at a May Day celebration.

From an article by Elizabeth Butt in 1999:

"The most prevalent opinion is that Morris Dancing is based on a pre-Christian Fertility or luck-bringing ceremony. Over time, these 'pagan' dances were adopted by the church and by the 1500's, dances were being performed for Easter, May Day and other parish feasts, with the emphasis being on raising funds for the church.

The traditional dress for Morris is that of an all white costume with bells worn on the dancers legs. The white signifies power over darkness and the bells were used to scare to devil out of the ground before planting. As Morris Dancing has come through generations of men who have worked the land, there is probably something in this interpretation. Dances vary greatly, depending on the location of the teams.

Perhaps the most common type of Morris performed is the Cotswold (a region located in the western half of England.) Cotswold dances usually consist of a series of distinctive maneuvers. There are several traditions of Cotswold dances and their differences usually lie in the style of the distinctive figures. Some use handkerchiefs and others clash sticks, whilst some dances are precise and some are disorderly."

I saw both the use of handkerchiefs and sticks:

 

Still tracking the origin of the addition of 'maple' to the name - the maypole was usually made of maple, or is it that the Canadian teams changed the name to reflect the Canadian version of the tradition? 

The exhibition was perfect for a fall day. Attracted lots of crowds, including two brides in the square in Fells Point who were having their pics taken and were pulled into the dance. Looks like great fun, but I'm fairly certain my knees could never withstand the leaps!

English Country Dancing the Night Away

I'm finally getting to post about the English Country Dance I attended last Monday at St. Mark's church in Pikesville, Maryland.

Some things I should tell you up front:

1) I was really worried about screwing up and I did - many, many times, but all was well and it didn't matter.

2) Wear flat, well-soled shoes - meaning they have some texture to them so you don't slide.

3) Don't eat for several hours before. It's quite a workout and, if you are nauseated by exercising in a hot room (and, therefore, you abhor 'hot yoga' as I do), that might be the case for you at a dance like this.

4) There was no Mr. Darcy at my dance, but you could get luckier!

I drove over with my friend and fellow brave soul, Shara,and we were both pretty nervous. Perhaps it was perfomance anxiety or just that neither one of us had set out to learn something new and so wholly foreign to us in a very long time. Maybe ever.

The setting was charming, an old stone church with archways and stone paths and lots of greenery, still dripping with rain from an earlier shower. We were warmly received and introduced around, and the caller gave us a brief lesson on some of the steps.

(Note here: fortunately, another friend and accomplished country dancer, Barbara M. gave us a nearly two hour lesson two days before, which helped tremendously. Had we not had that, it would have been harder. What I'd love to find and what I think is needed, is a real class. An hour or so for several weeks where you can learn with other newbies and move slowly through the dances, stopping to make corrections and redoing parts of it over several times. The more complicated parts. I'm also all for just being thrown into the pool, but I wouldn't say that what I learned stayed with me as it was in the moment, by following my partner and the other dancers and so didn't make a lasting impression. I would have dearly loved to learn and retain as I went, rather than grasp things quickly out of a survival instinct! It's a blur in that case, so we're going as many times as we can for the next few months. It's something I'd like to keep up with.)

That said, everyone was fantastic. They were happy to have us there and there was no shortage of kind and patient gentlemen asking us to dance and guiding us expertly through, explaining steps whenever possible. You are to look your partner and the other dancers in the eye the entire time, which was a little disconcerting and meant that Shara and I grinned giddily most of the time. It felt strangely intimate. The oddest part was to lock eyes with those who were deadly serious and showed no humor on their face at all. Fortunately, these were few. Most smiled back and this practice helps the other dancers guide you through the dance and creates a warm connection and festive air.

The caller walked us through the dance once or twice, and some of them were new, even to those dancers that attend every week - apparently they have a book of 300. And then we were off and I quickly learned you have to just go with it and not think too much about the next step. The good news is you do the same series of steps as you move down the set (the line of couples facing each other), so after the first few stumbles, you get the hang of it.

The problem for me was when I reached the end of the set with my partner and then had to move back up. Those moving up and those moving down each have some differences to the steps and you are, in some places, reversing what you did going down the set. So here’s where I often got lost and it took me longer to get the hang of the return back to the top of the set.

After two dances I won’t lie, I was absolutely pouring with sweat. The church wasn’t air conditioned and, though it was cool outside, it got very warm, very quickly, inside. I can't imagine dancing in the layers and the corset of the Regency period. Talk about unromantic! I was going to rest because I was starting to get information overload, but someone else asked me to dance and I couldn’t say no. It was on this third dance that I completely lost the thread and was eventually just following what people were telling me as the dance progressed. I retained parts of it, but other parts not.

I will say, that once or twice, as we were learning the dance, my partner missed part of the instruction and so I missed it too as a result. While he was able to correct himself quickly, I was not, being too new to know when and how to compensate. So, that third dance was the low point for me and I just prayed for it to end quickly so I could get some water and some air! I can see now why so many women fainted, having to wear those corsets and with so many people surely making the room very close. I didn’t have the luxury of being able to swoon, a fan, or Colonel Brandon to half-carry me out of the room!

The floor got slippery on my side of the room, whether from the sweat of the dancers or from the drinking of water, which was nearby and perhaps was spilled. So I was also trying not to wipe out!

I was able to sit out the fourth dance and just watch and it was a gorgeous dance with several sets of six couples and lots of complicated (at least to me) exchanges and crossovers and turns. They were all so graceful and skilled; it was a joy to watch. I hope someday to be that good.

Shara and I danced one last dance (separately – we often did not encounter each other during the dance – at one point there were two sets and she was in the other one), whose name I can’t remember (in fact, the only one I remember was the first one – The Major; I’ll try to do better), but in that dance things finally started coming together for me. I don’t know whether it was simpler or I was getting the hang of it, but I was so connected to the dance that what came next was more instinctual for me than about having learned it, and I was able to guide some members of the set who turned the wrong way or hesitated. That was very satisfying.

 

Here are some links to the host of the dance I went to, the Baltimore Folk Music Society and the Country Dance and Song Society, which show some of the figures and have definitions of them and videos as well.

  

So, should you try it? I give you an unequivocal and resounding yes! It was so much fun and challenging and we were pretty darn proud of ourselves for making it through. We have plans to go again tomorrow night (Monday), as we were given a free pass, which was a nice gesture. (The dance costs $10 for non-members.)

I hope you give it a try. Leave me a comment here if you do. Or if you are someone who attends these dances, leave some tips!