Oxford World’s Classics

by Jane Austen

  Royal Academy for Seamen at Portsmouth: the Royal Naval Academy, later the Royal Naval College, where JA’s brothers Francis and Charles Austen began their illustrious careers. It took boys from the age of 11 to 17. Francis Austen entered in Apr. 1786, just before his twelfth birthday; Charles shortly after his twelfth birthday in July 1791. The Academy cost nothing for the sons of naval officers, but the Revd George Austen had to pay £75 per annum for Charles’s tuition and expenses, a hefty slice of his income.

  Newfoundland: the island of Newfoundland in Canada, Britain’s oldest colony. A naval presence defended its valuable fisheries during Britain’s many skirmishes with France, Spain, and Holland.

  Newfoundland Dog: a very large breed of hunting dog, imported to Britain from the late 17th century onwards. Henry Tilney has a ‘large Newfoundland puppy’ (NA, ch. 26).

  every Month: revised from ‘every Year’, thereby heightening the absurdity (see Textual Notes, p. 225).

  65 adopted by a neighbouring Clergyman: perhaps another allusion to Edward Austen’s adoption by the Knights in 1783. Here, the motive for such an adoption is comically lacking since this ‘Benefactor’ has scarcely any money and plenty of his own children to provide for.

  Curacy of fifty pound a year: a very small income, a quarter of that earned by the clergyman.

  65 twopenny Dame’s School: a cheap, private, local school for young children, typically run by an elderly or widowed woman and offering lessons in basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. This is the earliest instance of ‘dame-school’ cited in the OED, though dozens of earlier texts mention the institution. Perhaps the best-known 18th-century work on the dame’s school was William Shenstone’s mock-Spenserian poem The School-Mistress (1737).

  genius: ‘Nature; disposition’ ( Johnson’s Dictionary).

  brickbats: ‘Fragments of brick deployed as missiles’ (OED).

  Ode to Pity

  66 Miss Austen: JA’s sister Cassandra; see ‘The beautifull Cassandra’, note to p. 37.

  Ode to Pity: William Collins’s well-known ‘Ode to Pity’ (1746) was included in Dodsley’s Collection of Poems (1758), a copy of which JA owned (see ‘Jack & Alice’, note to p. 15). By the end of the 18th century, Collins rivalled Thomas Gray as the most popular lyric poet in the language; the works of both writers were frequently imitated. JA’s poem does not attempt to replicate the rhyme scheme or other formal properties of Collins’s ‘Ode’.

  pitiful: ‘Melancholy; moving compassion’ and ‘Tender; compassionate’ ( Johnson’s Dictionary).

  Paths of honour: possibly echoing Thomas Gray’s wildly popular Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751): ‘The Paths of Glory lead but to the Grave’ (l. 36).

  Myrtle: ‘A fragrant tree sacred to Venus’ ( Johnson’s Dictionary): Phaedra, besotted with her stepson, Hippolytus, pierced its leaves. Collins’s ‘Ode’ includes the lines ‘There first the Wren thy Myrtles shed | On gentle Otway’s infant Head’ (ll. 19–20).

  Philomel: a poetic or literary name for the nightingale, alluding to the classical myth of the maiden Philomela’s transformation into that bird (OED).

  Gently brawling … Silent Stream: ‘brawling’ here means ‘The confused din of a stream or torrent’ (OED); the first citation supporting the word in this sense dates from 1837. JA’s noisy scene poses a striking contrast to the ‘soft notes’ and soothing, muted atmosphere of Collins’s ‘Ode’ (l. 23). There may be an echo here of As You Like It: ‘an oak, whose antique root peeps out | Upon the brook that brawls along this wood’ (act 2, scene 1); the last word of JA’s poem is ‘peep’. The incongruous pairing of a prosaic turnpike with a pastoral stream appears, too, in ‘Love and Friendship’: ‘Before us ran the murmuring brook and behind us ran the turnpike road’ (p. 86). Turnpike roads charged travellers at toll gates before they were allowed to proceed; money accrued in this way was supposed to pay for maintaining the roads.

  The hut, the Cot, the Grot: poeticisms; the hut may recall Pity’s ‘Cell’ in Collins (l. 21); ‘Cot’ is a small house or little cottage; and ‘Grot’ is grotto.

  eke: ‘Also; likewise; beside; moreover’ ( Johnson’s Dictionary); a poeticism, often comically redundant. It is noted under the verb ‘To eke’ that ‘our old poets … put eke into their lines, when they wanted a syllable’ ( Johnson’s Dictionary).

  the Abbey too a mouldering heap: ruined abbeys were a popular Gothic motif, especially in fiction of the early 1790s; cf. NA, ch. 17. The ‘mouldering heap’ echoes Gray’s Elegy: ‘Where heaves the Turf with many a mould’ring Heap’ (l. 14).

  Conceal’d by aged pines: on arrival at Mr B’s Lincolnshire mansion, where she will be imprisoned, Richardson’s Pamela is struck by the ‘brown nodding Horrors of lofty Elms and Pines about it’ (i, letter 31).

  June 3d 1793: a day later than the dedication of the previous group of writings to Anna Austen, and the latest date JA gives to any of her teenage works.

  VOLUME THE SECOND

  67 Ex dono mei Patris: ‘A gift from my father’, a rare use of Latin in JA’s writing. The notebook containing Volume the Second was a present from the Revd George Austen.

  contents: JA inserted page numbers beside each of the items. ‘Scraps’ covers a number of different pieces whose individual titles are not listed here, nor are those pieces referred to collectively as ‘Scraps’ other than on the Contents page.

  Friendship: corrected here from ‘Freindship’, although the ‘ei’ spelling predominates in the story itself (see Note on Spelling).

  Love and Friendship

  68 Madame La Comtesse De Feuillide: JA’s cousin Eliza de Feuillide; see also ‘Frederic & Elfrida’, note to p. 3; ‘Henry & Eliza’, note to p. 27. She was probably at Steventon during the period including 13 June 1790, the date given at the end of ‘Love and Friendship’. This is the only one of the teenage writings dedicated to her, although she clearly inspired ‘Henry & Eliza’.

  69 Love and Freindship: this titular pairing features in e.g. Love and Friendship; or, The Lucky Recovery. A Comedy (1754). Letter-writing manuals, popular throughout the 18th century, commonly offered advice on how to treat love and friendship, as noted on their title pages. Another possible source for JA’s title and epigraph is the motto ‘Amoris and Amicitiae’ (‘Of Love and Friendship’) on a miniature portrait of Eliza de Feuillide (Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen’s ‘Outlandish Cousin’: The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide (London: British Library, 2002), 55–6, 96). Cf. also The Loiterer, no. 27, in which ‘every Girl who seeks for happiness’ is told ‘to avoid love and friendship’ (11–12). The heroine of Garrick’s Bon Ton, Miss Tittup, announces ‘Pooh, pooh, Love and Friendship are very fine names to be sure, but they are mere visiting acquaintance; we know their names indeed, talk of ’em sometimes, and let ’em knock at our doors, but we never let ’em in’ (act 1, scene 1). See also ‘The three Sisters’, note to p. 58.

  69 in a series of Letters: a stock subtitle in fiction of the period, signalling the epistolary form of the ensuing novel and employed in Eliza Nugent Bromley’s anonymous Laura and Augustus, An Authentic Story; in a Series of Letters, by a Young Lady, 3 vols. (1784), a major source for ‘Love and Friendship’. Like JA, Bromley writes about female friends, tyrannical fathers, tales of adventures and life stories, wild emotions, the death of the hero, and a heroine who goes mad.

  Deceived in Freindship & Betrayed in Love: the conclusion of a four-line glee for three voices, attributed to Colonel R. Mellish (1777–1817), a member of one of the glee clubs: ‘Welcome the covert of these aged oaks, | Welcome each cavern of these horrid rocks, | Far from this world’s illusion let me rove, | Deceiv’d in Friendship, and betray’d in love.’ The Poetry of Various Glees, Songs, &c. As Performed at the Harmonists (1798), 109.

  Isabel to Laura: Isabel was the original form of the popular name Isabella, later given to Isabella Thorpe in NA and Isabella Knightley in E; Laura, an unusual name with literary pedigree, gained new popularity in novels of th
e 1780s and 1790s, including Bromley’s Laura and Augustus.

  detail … of your Life: cf. ‘Jack & Alice’, in which Alice asks Lady Williams ‘Will you favour me with your Life & Adventures’; the same question is later put to Lucy. See notes to pp. 13 and 16.

  cruel Persecutions of obstinate Fathers: the best-known example of such paternal cruelty and obstinacy was Mr Harlowe, father of Richardson’s tragic heroine Clarissa, who is fixed on marrying her to a man she detests. More recent epistolary treatments of paternal tyrants and persecuted heroines included Sarah Scott’s The Test of Filial Duty. In a Series of Letters between Miss Emilia Leonard, and Miss Charlotte Arlington. A Novel, 2 vols. (1772); The History of Miss Pamela Howard, 2 vols. (1773); and The Fatal Marriage: A Novel, 2 vols. (1785). The heroine of Bromley’s Laura and Augustus laments ‘the tyranny of a parent! from him have originated all my sorrows’ (iii, letter 47). Sir Anthony Absolute in Sheridan’s The Rivals, a play in which JA performed, may also be an influence on the portrayal of supposedly despotic fathers in this tale.

  70 Marianne: cf. Marianne Dashwood in S&S, a heroine embodying acute sensibility.

  natural Daughter of a Scotch Peer by an italian Opera-girl: ‘natural’ means ‘illegitimate’, the offspring of unmarried parents. An opera-girl did not sing, but danced in the ballet interludes presented between the acts of an opera. The costumes of opera-girls were revealing; like actresses, they were understood to be sexually available to wealthy male patrons. Cf. The Solitary Castle, A Romance of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (1789): ‘Mr. Le Fleur was the fruit of an illicit amour, between an Italian opera girl, and an English peer’ (i, 124).

  a Convent in France: Eliza, illegitimate daughter of a duke, in Laura and Augustus, reports being educated at a French convent and that her mother is Italian (i, letter 4).

  romantic: ‘Full of wild scenery’ ( Johnson’s Dictionary), a sublime landscape ‘that fills the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power; that inspires awe, great reverence, or other high emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur’ (OED ‘sublime’, 9).

  Vale of Uske: the river Usk runs through a picturesque river valley north of Newport in south Wales. For a description of its charms see William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770 (1782); see also ‘A Tour through Wales’ (p. 156).

  shortly surpassed my Masters: spoofing the conventional requirement that heroines in fiction must be superlatively accomplished; cf. Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, i, ch. 1. Looking back on JA’s life, Henry Austen wrote that ‘In the present age it is hazardous to mention accomplishments’ (Memoir, 139).

  Rendez-vous: a newly fashionable French word, meaning either a meeting or a favoured meeting place; Laura’s use of the term is both affected and slightly odd. JA originally offered an explanation of the word, as ‘place of appointment’, then deleted it (see Textual Notes, p. 226).

  tremblingly alive: possibly alluding to Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–4): ‘Or Touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er, | To smart, and agonize at ev’ry pore’ (epistle 1, ll. 189–90), though the phrase appears so often in fiction of the period as to amount to novelistic cant. See e.g. Sophia Briscoe’s Miss Melmoth; or, The New Clarissa, 3 vols. (1771): ‘guard your expressions, she is tremblingly alive all o’er’ (ii, 160, letter 55); Agnes Maria Bennett’s Anna: or Memoirs of a Welch Heiress: ‘The heart of Anna, naturally soft and tremblingly alive to sympathy and compassion, was now unaccountably hardened’ (ii, 34); Burney’s Cecilia: ‘how fearfully delicate, how “tremblingly alive” is the conscience of man!’ (bk 7, ch. 7).

  Minuet Dela Cour: ‘minuet of the court’, a highly stylized dance for couples, associated with the French court and popular in England from the mid-17th century.

  neighbourhood was small … eoconomical motives: cf. Sarah Fielding’s History of Ophelia, in which the heroine is reared by her aunt in a similarly isolated cottage and Captain Traverse retires to Wales for reasons of financial constraint (i, ch. 2, ch. 28).

  71 one of the first Boarding-schools in London: cf. ‘Edgar & Emma’, p. 26 and note. In the late 18th century, boarding schools were an increasingly popular choice for young girls from wealthy backgrounds.

  Southampton: JA briefly attended boarding school in Southampton in 1783 (see ‘Henry & Eliza’, note to p. 27), where she and Cassandra were infected with typhus; the port was notorious for its dirt, bad smells, and poor air. Having ‘supped’ one night in Southampton is scarcely a claim to distinction. JA originally wrote ‘slept’; the revision heightens the joke in abbreviating the timespan (see Textual Notes, p. 226).

  71 Beware … the Metropolis: cf. a similar joke about the city in JA’s letter of 23 Aug. 1796: ‘Here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted’ (Letters, 5).

  rustic Cot: a country cottage; poeticized and picturesque language. There is another ‘Cot’ in JA’s ‘Ode to Pity’, p. 66.

  We must not … partly convinced: JA here makes a substantial revision, deleting three lines and condensing the father’s speech; the scene thereby becomes more focused (see Textual Notes, p. 226).

  72 I long to know who it is: possibly echoing a protracted episode in Tristram Shandy, in which Walter and Toby Shandy discuss the activities of their visitors (bk 1, ch. 21; bk 2, ch. 6); cf. also Miss Tittup in Bon Ton, reflecting on ‘Love and Freindship’ that ‘they are mere visiting acquaintance; we … let ’em knock at our doors, but we never let ’em in’ (see note to p. 69).

  Lindsay … Talbot: Lindsay is a noble Scottish name, Talbot an eminently English and heroic one. JA sends up the fictional convention of concealing the names of invented characters as if they were real people; see ‘Henry & Eliza’, note to p. 28; ‘The three Sisters’, note to p. 54; ‘A Tale’, note to p. 156.

  Baronet: the lowest hereditary rank; see ‘Sir William Mountague’, note to p. 34.

  Polydore … Claudia: strangers would not have been addressed by their Christian names; these names are also absurdly unrealistic, deriving in the first case from romance and drama and from a Roman matron in the second.

  Deluding Pomp of Title … Lady Dorothea: ‘Deluding Pomp’ or ‘Delusive Pomp’ is a stock phrase in 18th-century literature, routinely applied to the supposedly hollow attractions of nobility, royalty, court titles, etc. See e.g. James Thomson, The Seasons (1730), ‘Autumn’, l. 1296. As a baronet, Sir Edward Lindsay would be eager to unite his son and Lady Dorothea, who in view of her title must be the daughter of a duke, marquess, or earl.

  73 Never … obliged my Father: continuing the theme of children in conflict with their parents or guardians (see note to p. 69); however, the usual plot line is advanced to a new stage of absurdity here, with a son defying a father who wants him to marry the woman he loves. Cf. ‘Frederic & Elfrida’, note to p. 5.

  Gibberish: ‘cant language, pedlars[’] French; or St Giles’s Greek’ (Classical Dictionary); ‘Cant; the private language of rogues and gipsies; words without meaning’ ( Johnson’s Dictionary).

  studying Novels I suspect: a gender reversal; young women rather than men were usually criticized for reading novels. On the general scorn for novel-readers cf. Laura and Augustus: ‘This comes of people suffering their children to read those ridiculous books called novels’ (i, letter 11). Defending the novel, JA writes that ‘no species of composition has been so much decried’, while Henry Tilney declares that ‘The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid … I myself have read hundreds and hundreds’ (NA, ch. 5, ch. 14); JA noted that her family were ‘great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so’ (Letters, p. 27, 18–19 Dec. 1798).

  Bedfordshire … Middlesex: Bedfordshire is about 30 miles north of Middlesex; rather than travel this distance Edward has gone about a hundred miles west to the Vale of Usk.

  never taken orde
rs … Church: despite being ‘bred to the Church’, Laura’s father has not been ordained a clergyman (he is also, apparently, a Catholic); Laura and Edward are therefore not legally married. Cf. other questionable or invalid wedding ceremonies in ‘Henry & Eliza’, ‘Lesley-Castle’ (Letter the Tenth), ‘Collection of Letters’ (Letter the second).

  75 Does it appear impossible … to argue with: this dispute between a rational and an irrational character on love, sustenance, and practicality echoes that of Laura and Augustus: ‘take yourself off with your beggar’s brat, and see if love will support you: you will find it, Madam heroine, I fancy damned slender diet’ (ii, letter 39).

  76 Sophia: a common name for sentimental heroines, it means ‘wisdom’. JA applies it ironically to vacant or fickle women; cf. ‘Collection of Letters’, p. 137.

  77 pathetic: ‘Affecting the passions; passionate; moving’ ( Johnson’s Dictionary).

  We fainted Alternately on a Sofa: cf. the comic use of ‘alternately’ in ‘Frederic & Elfrida’ (p. 3 and note) and ‘Edgar & Emma’ (p. 25 and note).

  illiterate: ‘Unlettered; untaught; unlearned; unenlightened by science’ ( Johnson’s Dictionary), rather than unable to read or write. Cf. Laura’s later reference to an ‘illiterate villain’ (p. 90).

  78 Clandestine Marriage: Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753 prohibited the secret marriage of minors, and parents could prevent such ceremonies; the possibility of clandestine marriage (of dubious legality) often features in epistolary fiction. Cf. George Colman and David Garrick’s The Clandestine Marriage (1766); the phrase itself pre-dates their play. See also ‘Henry & Eliza’, note to p. 29; ‘Sir William Mountague’, note to p. 35.