Jane and The Wandering Eye jam-3

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Jane and The Wandering Eye jam-3 Page 30

by Stephanie Barron


  60

  Readers of Persuasion will be familiar with Molland’s, where Anne Elliot reencounters Captain Frederick Wentworth in a sudden Bath rainstorm. — Editor’s note.

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  61

  The coat-of-arms of the Prince of Wales is a crown surmounted by three ostrich plumes. Both his acknowledged wife — Caroline, Princess of Wales — and Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Catholic to whom he had been previously married by an Anglican priest in 1786, sported the three feathers throughout their households. — Editor’s note.

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  62

  Those respectful of the Sabbath rarely traveled on Sunday in Austen’s time. — Editor’s note.

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  63

  The Crescent refers not to the imposing houses of the Royal Crescent on Brock Street, but to the broad green immediately opposite, where all of fashionable Bath was wont to walk on Sunday afternoons. — Editor’s note.

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  64

  Cassandra Austen was engaged in 1792 to marry the Reverend Thomas Craven Fowle (1765–1797), son of the Austens’ lifelong friends and a protégé of Lord Craven, whose naval expedition to the West Indies in 1795 Fowle felt obligated to join. He died of yellow fever in San Domingo in February 1797. He left Cassandra a legacy of one thousand pounds. — Editor’s note.

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  65

  An Indiaman was a merchant ship transporting cargo from the East Indies. They were usually owned by the Honourable East India Company, but in this case, we may read the term to indicate one of the Earl’s private vessels. — Editor’s note.

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  66

  Since magistrates were appointed by influential patrons, Lord Harold is suggesting that Mr. Elliot’s career might be at risk. — Editor’s note.

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  67

  James Austen’s first wife, Anne Mathew, whom he married in 1792, died suddenly in 1795 — after which he married Mary Lloyd, the sister of Jane’s lifelong friend Martha. Martha would later become Frank Austen’s second wife. — Editor’s note.

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  68

  This description of Anne Lefroy’s death accords quite closely with that contained in the family memoir Jane Austen: A Family Record (by William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, revised by Deirdre LeFaye, London: The British Library, 1989). — Editor’s note.

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  69

  Jane ascribes similar feelings, in virtually the same language, to Anne Elliot of Persuasion—a woman who, at twenty-seven, regrets the advice of her older friend, Lady Russell, who discouraged her attachment eight years previously to a young sailor without prospects. Jane allowed Anne Elliot to be eventually reunited with Captain Frederick Wentworth. — Editor’s note.

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  70

  Women rarely attended funerals in Austen’s day, it being considered the province of a family’s male members to follow the body to both chapel and cemetery. The best a bereaved woman might do was to read Divine Service in the privacy of her home. — Editors note.

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  71

  In August 1799, Jane Leigh-Perrot was accused by a shopkeeper in Bath Street of stealing a card of white lace, which was found wrapped with some black lace she had purchased in the establishment. She denied the theft — and was probably framed by the shopkeeper, who knew that the monetary value of the stolen lace — in excess of twelve pence — made the theft a capital crime, punishable by death or transportation to Australia. Blackmail was probably the object, and when the Leigh-Perrots refused to pay for silence, they were imprisoned together at Ilchester gaol for seven months before Mrs. Leigh-Perrot’s trial and acquittal. Austen scholar Park Honan points out, however, that Mrs. Leigh-Perrot’s defense attorney thought she was a kleptomaniac who got off. — Editor’s note.

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  72

  Charades formed a part of Christmas revels in England throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. They took two forms — the recitation of a riddle, the first part of which defined the first syllable of a word, and the second its ending; or the presentation of a short play, designed to illustrate each syllable and the word as a whole. Several charades thought to be composed by James Leigh-Perrot and Jane Austen can be found in Jane Austen: Collected Poems and Verse of the Austen Family (David Selwyn, ed., U.K.: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1996). Mr. Leigh-Perrot’s are sweet but obvious, while Jane’s are brief and fiendishly clever. — Editor’s note.

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  73

  The Waits were a group of carolers often paid by the mayor of a town to sing at public functions or holidays. Over time, the term evolved to mean any group of Christmas carolers who performed for tips. — Editor’s note.

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  74

  Maria Cosway and Thomas Lawrence collaborated on the 1801 portrait of the Princess of Wales and her daughter, with Mrs. Cosway completing much of the portrait’s ground, and Lawrence working on the principals’ faces. — Editor’s note.

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  75

  Angerstein’s extraordinary collection was purchased by the nation following his death, and formed the basis of the National Gallery in the structure newly built for that purpose in Trafalgar Square. The Lawrence portrait of Angerstein — a friend and patron of many years’ duration — was painted between 1790 and 1795. It hangs in the National Gallery, London. — Editor’s note.

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  76

  The portrait of Isabella Wolff, begun in 1802, is patterned after the pose of the Erythraean Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. — Editor’s note.

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  77

  The details of the Siddons girls’ love affairs with Thomas Lawrence, and their untimely ends — as well as the supposition that he sought them both out of a thwarted desire for their mother — can be found in The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and the London Stage, by Linda Kelly (New York: Random House, 1980). — Editor’s note.

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  78

  The Upper Rooms, as they were called in Austen’s time to distinguish them from those in the lower part of town, are now called the Assembly Rooms. — Editor’s note.

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  79

  This charade has long been attributed to Austen’s pen, but we learn here it was actually created by Lord Harold. — Editor’s note.

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  80

  Henry Rice, Madam Lefroy’s son-in-law, although the curate of Ashe, was a confirmed gamester who ended his days in flight to the Continent, pursued for debt. — Editor’s note.

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  81

  James Austen refers here to the death of Anne Lefroy’s second son, Anthony Brydges Lefroy, who was injured in a fall from a horse at the age of fourteen, and endured a lingering decline of some two years before dying in 1800. — Editor’s note.

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