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Volume the Second by Jane Austen
In Her Own Hand
By Jane Austen Abbeville Press
Copyright © 2014 Jane Austen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7892-1200-9
Excerpt from
Volume the SecondIntroduction
Teenage Reading and Rebellion
As its mock-solemn title implies,
Volume the Second is the second in the series of notebooks into which the teenage Jane Austen copied her early compositions. This is the most finished of the three collections; it is also the longest (with 252 pages) and the most carefully structured. Twelve leaves are missing from its original structure, five of them taken from the end, most likely removed at the time of writing into the notebook. No empty space is left, and there is no obvious development in the young author's hand to suggest that she worked on the entries over a long period. Internal dating (from June 1790 to January 1793, when her niece Fanny Austen was born) link the contents with a period of high productivity, particularly intense between the ages of fifteen and sixteen.
Where the truncated fragments of
Volume the First riot in joyous disorder, barely anchored by their network of family dedications, the pieces assembled here achieve a more unified sensibility without sacrificing any of their comedy. Indeed,
Volume the Second has a good claim to be Jane Austen's funniest work; it is impossible not to laugh out loud while reading it. The manuscript is made up of nine items: two works identified by the author as “novels” (“Love and Friendship” and “Lesley Castle”); a spoof “History of England”; “A Collection of Letters”; and five “Scraps”, among them the single act of a comic play which conclude the volume and form a matching bookend to the mini anthology of “Miscellaneous Morsels” or “Detached Pieces” that round off
Volume the First. Dedicated to her firstborn nice, Fanny Austen (as those inserted at a slightly later date into
Volume the First are to her second niece, Anna Austen), these final sketches openly mocked the restrictive educational diet proposed for young ladies and the narrow role of moral guide laid down for spinster aunts. Young Aunt Jane will have none of it; instead, the final pages of both notebooks seal a more subversive contract with the next generation of Austen females. As she writes here to Fanny, only weeks old”I think it is a my particular Duty to prevent your feeling as much as possible the want of my personal instructions, by addressing to You on paper my Opinions & Admonitions on the conduct of Young Women, which you will find expressed in the following pages” (p. 237).
“Opinions & Admonitions on the conduct of Young Women” offers a good way into understanding the structure and contents of
Volume the Second, with its sustained onslaught on the conventional limits on female behavior. Other hints as to how to read the collection are provided in its repeated use of epistolary form, and especially the novel in letters, and its focus on sensibility as a facet or modifier of behavior. The late eighteenth century saw a proliferation of works featuring heroes and heroines of sensibility; that is, characters sympathetic to the sufferings and feelings of others. Where knockabout humor dominated
Volume the First, Volume the Second represents a shift towards more extended studies of character and motive. Austen’s word
“conduct” is key here, with its reference to that sector of the late-eighteenth-century book market dedicated to manuals of instruction for middle class girls.
A particularly successful example of the conduct-book genre with Hester Mulso Chapone's
Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady. First published in 1773, two years before Jane Austen's birth, by the end of the century it had been reprinted in individual editions at least sixteen times and was regularly bundled with other similar manuals to form small “Ladies’ Libraries,” as they were called, of improving texts. Chapone’s book is addressed by an aunt to her niece in her “fifteenth year”—the very age, of course, of Jane Austen as she writes the pieces assembled in
Volume the Second. The coincidence is not accidental: not only does the teenage Austen mock the restrictive advice of such solemn works, but by announcing herself an authority “on the conduct of Young Women” she is turning the tables on the adult world, setting up the teenager as instructor. As a whole and in its parts,
Volume the Second is best appreciated as a perverse conduct manual, a guide to behaving badly.
In context
Volume the Second closely matches (and distorts) the educational syllabus proposed by works like Chapone’s
Letters, with their emphasis on rules for correct female behavior. Advice on a wide range of general issues, from reading, dress and desirable accomplishments to the control of moods and the demeanor expected of a daughter, wife, or mother (the only roles for which wellborn teenage girls were trained), was combined in conduct manuals of the time with more specific recommendations: to study botany, geology, history and especially chronology (tables of significant dates and events); to learn household management and the care of children; to avoid sentimental novels. Early in “Love and Friendship,” the first story, Austen has a father observe: “Where…did you pick up this unmeaning Gibberish? You have been studying Novels I suspect? (page 12). In terms of genre, these manuals fused devotional writings, marriage advice, recipe books and educational tracts. Their aim was to create on paper a composite character or model of the ideal young lady and to construct examples to guide her lifelong behavior in imagined situations. Accordingly, Chapone’s
Letters are divided into topics like “On the Regulation of the Heart and Affections”( letters 4 and 5); “On the Government of the Temper” (letter 6); “On Economy” (letter 7); “On the Manner and Course of Reading History” (letter 10).
It is no coincidence that the epistolary form dominates
Volume the Second. Chapone’s chapters are written as letters from aunt to niece, creating the illusion of an intimate conversational space open to the expression of opinions and moral debate. The novel written as a series of letters became popular in the late eighteenth century and grows out of the conduct manual. Epistolary novels tend to be dominated by the psychology and motives of the letter writer, and they openly invite interpretation as correspondence and engage in reading one another's behavior and views directly off the page. In this sense, they close the distance between characters in fiction and their actual readers, since everyone is a reader. The first two works in
Volume the Second are subtitled “novel in letters.” Next comes “The History of England,” described by its writer in anti-conduct-book fashion as “By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian” who has little patience with Chapone’s championship of chronology; “N.B. There will be very few Dates in this History,” declares the revisionist historian (page 153). Its final sections again to revert to letters: five letters that parody the dilemmas facing a young woman as she enters adult society are followed by the final “Scraps,” three of which are also framed as letters.
In the conventional conduct book the letter is a vehicle for ideas; in the hands of the satirical author of
Volume the Second it becomes a virtuoso performance by a series of exhibitionist egos who, possessing no social filters, quickly disclose themselves and squander any credibility. In this they are the very reverse of the ideal, which recommends scrutiny, discretion and regulation of the passions. It is as if the young Jane Austen has strategically animated and empowered a whole regiment of teenage girls to openly revolt, in there antisocial and extravagant behavior, against the conduct-book models of the schoolroom and the drawing room. Where the targets of l
Volume the First were diverse,
Volume the Second displays a sustained focus.
The dedications reinforce this concentration; all but “Lesley Castle” (offered to her dashing undergraduate brother Henry) directly co-opt a female reader. “Love and Friendship” is dedicated to Austen's older cousin, the lively, fashionable and irreverent Eliza de Feuillide, who had married a Frenchman and was one of the most significant influences on her teenage years. Austen dedicates the schoolroom spoof “The History of England” to her sister Cassandra, in whose company she attended Mrs. La Tournelle’s Ladies Boarding School in the Abbey House, Reading. Her cousin Jane Cooper, who shared an earlier period of schooling in Southampton with Jane and Cassandra and joined in Austen family theatricals at Christmas 1788-89, is the recipient of “A Collection of Letters,” and the newborn Fanny Austen is given the benefit of her teenage aunt’s “personal instruction” in “Scraps.” Just as the epistolary form invokes—and parodies—a particular genre of teenage instruction, the dedications revisit Jane Austen's own educational formation and schooling and insinuate the reader as complicit with the revisionist writings that follow.
How do the young women in these stories behave? In “Love and Friendship” Laura wastes no time in ditching the polite exchange of voices usually implied by a series of letters: after the short opening note from her friend Isabel, the only point of you allowed to matter is her own; all the letters are written by Laura. Laura is resourceful, resilient and utterly self-serving. She lurches from one improbable adventure to another, bent solely on survival. Concern for others and the moderation of her own desires—qualities prized in the conventional young lady of sensibility of the conduct book—has become a distracting irrelevance; as she announces early on, “Tho’ indeed my own misfortunes do not make less impression on me than they ever did, yet now I never feel for those of an other” (p. 6). Her partner in crime, Sophia, is equally self-interested; together they run amok, exposing the absurd inadequacy of conventional morality for the situations they encounter. They contract illegal marriages, abandon their husbands, steal from friends and relations and indulge in excessive—and insincere—emotional displays. No good little stay-at-home misses, they zigzag the length and breadth of Britain, from Walls to Middlesex and London and on to various locations in Scotland, breaking all the rules of proper female behavior and exploiting every opportunity for their own gain.
Charlotte Lutterell, one of the correspondents in “Lesley Castle,” embodies a grotesque parody of the conduct manual’s instructions on domestic management and household economy. When the sudden death of her sister's fiancé prevents their wedding, Charlotte’s only concern is the food that will be wasted: “I had the mortification of finding that I had been Roasting, Broiling and Stewing both the Meat and Myself to no purpose” (p. 75). Food-fixated, Charlotte describes her sister's shock as leaving her face “as White as a Whipt syallbub.” Toward the end of the volume bad behavior takes on a more extreme aspect: among the scraps address to little Fanny Austen is “A Letter from a Young Lady,” in which the writer coolly confesses to every imaginable crime, including murdering her father and mother, and ends with the startling information that “I am now going to murder my Sister” (p. 247).
At the heart of the notebook, and in yet another swerve in direction, we discover two sisters who were also school friends sharing a joke about education. “The History of England” is illustrated with thirteen colored medallion portraits, each signed, “C E Austen pinx[it]” (Cassandra Elizabeth Austen painted [it]”). The only person to feature as a dedicatee in all three teenage notebooks, Cassandra, Austen's beloved sister, was her ideal reader, her most regular inspiration and, in her own right, as Jane lavishly recorded, “the finest comic writer of the present age.” Cassandra's cartoon portraits of kings and queens imitate those in Oliver Goldsmith’s schoolroom classic,
The History of England, and add a further interpretive dimension to the spoof “History,” transforming it into a genuine collaboration. Considerable care was evidently taken to allow sufficient space for the drawings as the pages were designed: on page 163, for instance, Austen begins a line of text and then erases it to make room for a portrait of Henry VIII. It has been suggested that some of Cassandra’s portraits may also refer to members of the Austen family, with Jane standing in for her heroine Mary Queen of Scots, and her mother for the wicked Queen Elizabeth, who had Mary beheaded. (See the foot of page 171, where the two queens face each other in open antagonism.) Though the idea has attracted some controversy, it is appealing and persuasive in the context of a parody conduct manual, at war with all proper authority, and a collection so thoroughly approving of rebellious children who, in the words of Laura in “Love and Friendship,” have “so nobly disentangled themselves from the Shackles of Parental Authority”(p. 26). It is worth noting that Austen's juvenilia in general take a satirical view of maternal behavior. Nor is this the most shocking aspect of “History,” in which Austen flirts dangerously, for the teenage daughter of a clergyman, with sexual innuendo, as in her allusion to James I's close friendships with young men (p. 181).
An unexpected aspect of
Volume the Second is it Scottish flavor. In the opening story, Laura and Sophia find refuge in McDonald-Hall, where their first act is to engineer the separation of Jeanetta and Graham, on the grounds that he is her father's choice (and therefore detestable) and—an equally serious charge—does not have “Auburn” hair. By the end, Laura has been united with an assortment of relations traveling together in the Edinburgh to Stirling coach, and we leave her a resident “in a romantic Village in the Highlands of Scotland”(p. 63). The next story, “Lesley Castle,” is set in Perthshire, an area of Scotland much recommended for its picturesque scenery by late eighteenth century travel writers. Here Matilda and Margaret Lesley are described by their young stepmother Susan Lesley as “two great, tall, out of the way, over-grown, Girls, just of a proper size to inhabit a Castle almost as Large in comparison as themselves”(p. 107). To their new mothers heart of the “scotch Giants” “have no Music, but Scotch Airs, no Drawings but Scotch Mountains, and no books but Scotch Poems.”. She rounds off her criticisms with the declaration: “And I hate everything Scotch” (p. 109).
From red hair to mountains and folk songs, Jane Austen catalogs the latest craze for all things Scottish, relishing what she pokes fun at. The Scottish theme continues in her open allegiance—what she calls “my Attachment to the Scotch”(p. 184)—to the exiled (and now defunct) Stuart monarchy in her “prejudiced” “History of England.” She had probably by now read Samuel Johnson and James Boswell’s accounts of their 1773 travels in the Highlands, the Sophia Lee’s historical romance
The Recess (1783-85), about the imagined daughters of Mary Queen of Scots, and perhaps even William Gilpin's most recent publication,
Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque beauty…Particularly in the High-Lands of Scotland (1789). She describes Gilpin, who was to remain one of her favorite writers, humorously and her “History” as among “those first of Men” (p. 168).
Samuel Johnson had gone to Scotland in the expectation of finding customs, people and scenery far stranger than the reality actually proved. His
Journey, published in 1775, the year Jane Austen was born, registers this frustration in the curious angle of vision by which he teases things into an appearance of greater abnormality: his determination to find not only romance but “savage wildness” around every bend in the road, his curious emphasis on the size of the people. Always an accomplished mimic, Austen catches his tone and exaggerates it further in Scottish riffs throughout
Volume the Second. Her comic lists of Scottish names (“the M’Leods, The M’Kenzies, the M’Phersons”; p. 70) are also to be found in Johnson and Boswell, supplemented from the from the most famous Scottish play of all, Shakespeare's
Macbeth, with a glance at Fanny Burney's melancholic Scotsman Mr. McCartney from her much admired
Evelina (1778). At the same time, the motley collection of Scottish traits and facts paraded through
Volume the Second can be read, like the inadequate grasp of geography that sets her characters on such idiosyncratic routes across Britain, as comment on the highly selective and inconsequential nature of female reading at the time.
Volume the Second, finished as she welcomed the birth of little Fanny Austen, marks the beginning of Jane Austen's lifelong celebration of the importance of aunts. “Now that you are become an Aunt, you are a person of some consequence & must excite great Interest whatever You do. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible,” wrote Jane to her niece Caroline Austen on October 30, 1815. In
Mansfield Park (1814) she would explore in Fanny Price, brought up by two bad aunts, the serious effect on adult prospects and happiness of an inadequate attention to female education. But in 1793 that would be some twenty years in the future. For now, Jane Austen glories and her newfound consequence as partial and prejudiced commentator on the proper reading for teenage girls.
This facsimile edition of
Volume the Second has been produced with care to match the size of the original notebook, the appearance of its paper and the brown-black color of the iron gall ink that Jane Austen used. The transcription following the manuscript is that of the great twentieth-century Austen scholar Robert W. Chapman. Chapman was the first to edit Jane Austen's manuscripts in full and his early editions now have classic status.
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Excerpted from Volume the Second by Jane Austen by Jane Austen. Copyright © 2014 Jane Austen. Excerpted by permission of Abbeville Press.
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