Random Jottings

Sanditon - Jane Austen

All Jane Austen fans will be eagerly looking forward to next Sunday when, in the UK anyway, a dramatisation of Sanditor is scheduled.  Any fragment by Jane that can be used in this way is seized upon with joy and I am very much looking forward to seeing what is going to be done with it.

Sanditon was left in manuscript at Jane Austen's death in July 1817 which ended at Chapter 12. So there is not much to deal with as with The Watsons (another fragment which will I am sure end up being dramatised at some stage).

In Sanditon, which was untitled when Jane died, she moves away from her usual setting of families in the countryside and writes, what Kathryn Sutherland in the OUP edition, calls "the first seaside novel".   In Emma we know that she longs to visit the seaside but has yet to do so, in Persuasion we have the famous fall by Louisa Musgrove at Lyme Regis.and in Mansfield Park there is an episode where Fanny visits her family in Portsmouth.  Jane visited the seaside and there have been theories that Sanditon is Sidmouth in Devon but she is very vague aboaut the topography so hard to prove one way or the other.

OUP Classics have produced a new edition of Sanditon edited by Kathryn Sutherland who I have already mentioned.  She is a professor of English literature and Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's Oxford, and here she has written an extremely interesting introduction to the text. 

Another edition, recently published, is issued by Fentum Press in a rather delightful hard back edition and has an introductory essay by Janet Todd. Janet is the General Editor of the Cambridge Works of Jane Austen and also edits the Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice. Another fascinating essay on the novel with beautiful colour illustrations throughout.  

here is a list of continuations at the end of the book and some of these I know, some I do not.  It seems a two hour film using Marie Dobbs completion was proposed but nothing has been heard since.

And it is to Marie Dobbs that I now turn. I have a copy of her continuation which was published in 1975 and it has been on my book shelves for years. I worked at Camden Libraries during this period and was sorting through a pile of books which had been withdrawn and were going to be pulped. When I spotted Sanditon I knew I could not allow it go and came home with it.  I rather enjoyed this version. Janet Todd says "it resembles Georgette Heyer's sort of romantic comedy (which is a good thing as far as I am concerned!) and drops the broad satire on medicine and invalid tourism of the Austen original".

I also have to mention Set in the Silver Sea by Jane Austen and A Gentleman which I discovered by chance about a year ago. The author is one David Williams and seems to be self published. I have a copy awaiting my attention and the only reason I have yet to read it is that is enormous. Not a small paperback but the size of a coffee table book so not easy to hold and read.

The dramatisation coming up has been scripted by Andrew Davies who is famous for "sexing up" the classics as he puts it. While I am not decrying his use of the dive in the lake by Darcy in P & P, it can get a bit tiresome after a while as he does rather labour the point. About eighteen months ago Davies produced a dramatisation of War and Peace which was beautiful to look at, but oh so slow and dreary. He managed to introdue incest into it because he said that Tolstoy had hinted at it. Well, I was not about to re-read War and Peace to find out but it seemed to me to be stretching it a bit.

As Sanditon is set by the sea I am sure there will be plenty of Andrew Davies frolics on the shore and nude bathing, but no matter what I am looking forward to this immensely.

 

Lazy Random

Once again I have let time go by and not posted. I have been reading up a storm that is why and I also was in London last week for this wonderful exhibition so I hope you will forgive me.

Three R's - Received, Reading and Re-Reading

Time to sit down and get up to date on the blog again. I simply do not know where the time goes. I have a list of subjects to write about and they are niggling away at me. So first up a general catch up.

Anglican women Novelists - ed Judith Maltby and Alison Shell

Now this looks really interesting. Somebody, I do not know who but I am grateful, mentioned this on Twitter and I immediately checked it out as it sounded right up my reading alley. In the foreword I see that this book began as a chance conversation some years ago at an academic conference in the US when it was discovered that the two editors had been reading Charlotte M Yonge and Rose Macauley on their flights. The idea for these essays was hatched but took some years to produce - and here they are.

There are essays on Charlotte Bronte, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte M Yonge, Dorothy L Sayers, Barbara Pym, P D James, Noel Streatfield and one of my all time loved authors, Elilzabeth Goudge. I have yet to start reading this book as I am savouring the joy I know awaits me and I want to ponder on this a bit longer. Sounds daft but it is so good to know I have a treat waiting me.

The Young Victoria - Deirdre Murphy

A beautifully produced book by Yale with that gorgeous smooth silky paper that academic publishers use. Stuffed with paintings and fascinating illustrations I am taking my time with this one as it is another to savour.  The author, Deidre Murphy, sadly died and it is due to the efforts of her colleagues at the Historic Palaces and Yale that this book was published.  Deidre takes the view that Queen Victoria had a somewhat jaundiced view of her childhood which was not as daunting or as unpleasant as she led us to believe and, indeed, some of her diaries and notes show that she was loved and adored and had a delightful childhood.   I think the main problems came later after the death of her father and when her mother came under the influence of John Conroy.  So many books out this year because of the 200th year anniversary of Queen Victoria's birth but this is sheer delight.

And then Re-reading.   I had the pleasure of meeting Jane Thynne at the Felixstowe Book Festival a few weeks ago when she gave a talk on her Clara Vine books, set in pre-war Berlin and this made me want to re-read them. So I have embarked on this and am really enjoying going back and refreshing my memory. When I first read them there was obviously a gap between each one and I find I had forgotten some of the details and it is good to go straight through them one after the other and follow the over arching narrative.

This link will enable you to click onto my reviews of two of her books:

https://randomjottings.typepad.com/random_jottings_of_an_ope/2015/04/a-war-of-flowers-jane-thynne.html

I mentioned Kate Rhodes recently and decided to do a re-read of the Alice Quintin books again and, once more, enjoyed them thoroughly.  It was good to be with her right from the start and to see how her relationship with DCI Burns slowly develops. 

After reading the latest it sounded as if they had come to and end (and the author has a new series set on the Scilly Isles) but after querying this with the author she tells me Alice may come back. I do hope so.

I have a very battered old copy of The Common Years by Jilly Cooper. The edition available at the moment is a "new" one, 1999. I think I have had mine since the eighties and it has delightful line drawings and has a lovely cover. I have it by my bedside table and am reading a chapter or two a night.

How I love Jilly! She writes beautifully with the most hilarious puns which I love (I know some don't) and I am finding myself enjoying this book all over again.

I am having a quiet week after a very busy time and am really enjoying the peace and quiet.  This goes for my reading too which is relaxed and easy.

I attended the van Gogh exhibition at Tate Britain this week and more of that anon. It was wonderful