Exclusive interview with editor Natasha Duquette and a review of a collection of essays on the connections between Jane Austen and the arts
RATING: THREE STARS
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I met a man named Vivasvan Soni while attending a Romanticism conference in Neuchatel Switzerland, where I chaired a panel on Jane Austen’s Prospects,” says Jane Austen and the Arts editor Natasha Duquette. “After a hike in the Alps, Viv and I discussed Jane Austen and philosophy over a fondue dinner in a tent.” It must have been an engaging dinner, because Soni later wrote the preface to Jane Austen and the Arts.
The book is a collection of essays examining Austen’s role as artist and her works as art, her aesthetic philosophy. This collection of essays began as a panel on Jane Austen and the Sublime as envisioned by Gillian Dow.
How much did Jane Austen affect drama, art, architecture, drama, dancing, poetry, and music of her time? Did she plan on changing her world? Or, was she just writing her observations? The writers explore the social, moral, psychological, and theological functions of art in Austen’s writing. Austen, who at first wrote anonymously, was revered even before her public knew she was the author.
The essays make connections between the aesthetics of Austen’s writing, both fiction and her letters, using Romanticism, Gothicism, music, dance art, and politics. Connections are drawn between Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Madame de Staël, Joanna Baillie and Jean Jacques Rousseau. What emerges is a woman who knew exactly what she was doing. The essays are easy to read if you’re familiar with Austen’s work, and this collection is a treat for Austen fans.
Duquette started doing research at the Chawton House Library in 2008. “The writer on whom that research is mostly focused is a contemporary of Austen’s named Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck,” says Duquette. In 1815, Schimmelpenninck wrote a treatise tiled A Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity. That book features prominently in the introduction to Jane Austen and the Arts and in the chapter titled Delicacy of Taste’ Redeemed: The Aesthetic Judgment and Spiritual Formation of Jane Austen’s Clergymen Heroes.
“As well as working at the Chawton House Library, I also worked at the British Library in London, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Huntington Library in San Marino California,” says Duquette. “I discovered the documents by reading 21st century scholarship on Austen in particular, and on Romantic-era women writers in general. Two books that have been very helpful in leading me towards interesting historical sources are: Jane Austen’s Anglicanism and Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender, and Romanticism.”
Duquette chaired a panel on Jane Austen and the Sublime at the 2009 Chawton House Library conference New Directions in Austen Studies. She edited a collection of essays titled Sublimer Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology (Cambridge Scholars, 2007) and created a modern, annotated edition of Helen Maria Williams’s 18th century novel Julia (Pickering & Chatto, 2009). “Jane Austen knew of and read Helen Maria Williams’s writing,” says Duquette. “Her hero Henry Tilney refers to Julia in Northanger Abbey.”
Jane Austen and the Arts has not been optioned for film or television. “I think it could be adapted into a fantastic BBC documentary,” says Duquette.
Duquette doesn’t have an agent. Duquette is currently working on Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Biblical Interpretation, a book for Pickwick. Duquette will be presenting a paper titled Fanny Price amidst the Philosophers at the 2014 Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America. The JASNA conference is October 10th through 12th in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. “The theme of that conference is Mansfield Park in Montreal,” says Duquette. “Also, an eminent Austen scholar named Sarah Emsley, author of Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues has invited me to write a guest entry about Mansfield Park for her blog.”
Duquette has a book launch and signing February 6th, 2014, at 7:30pm, in the Café Banquet Room of Biola University. Duquette is based in Fullerton. She was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety and Harmony. Hardcover, 282 pages, Publisher: Lehigh University Press (December 4th, 2013). Language: English ISBN-13: 978-1611461374 $72.00
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