Janet Todd

Remembering that this was a different time and most of the players are teenagers and young adults, the attraction to the narcissistic Percy B Shelley doesn’t seem far-fetched. Young women often fall for handsome young men who know how to weave a spell in them all.
The tragedy is that Fanny, the most innocent and well-intentioned person in this drama and her very existence denied; her sorrow was rewritten by friends and family in order to keep the ever thinning veneer of respectability they thought they had.… (mehr)

The protagonist of this well-written, keenly observed, but occasionally tiresome novel is Ann St. Clair, a woman judged unusual for 1816–she’s independent. Ann earns a very modest living churning out Gothic novels, a supreme irony, given that she’s shy, shrinks from gory sights or bad smells, and swallows a hundred times more feelings than she expresses.

Nevertheless, this shrinking violet enjoys her freedom to go where she will, with whom, and to manage her own affairs, even as she realizes the price she pays. With no husband, father, or suitor, Ann has no male protector and is therefore an outlier, something that strikes her most vividly when she visits her kindly cousin Sarah, married and a mother several times over. Sarah believes that a woman’s place is in the home, but she doesn’t criticize her (marginally) more worldly cousin.

Enter Robert James, an Irish-born writer who has attracted a coterie of men who hang on his every word. Robert has written nothing except a poetic fragment titled Attila, and he has a gift for cruel mimicry, yet this earns him the title of genius, a mantle he assumes as his due. Ann, who has drifted into this circle—one of two women the group tolerates, though just barely—is thrilled that the great man has noticed her. So starved is she for attention that she willingly becomes his lover, even though he cares not one whit about pleasing her and grows more and more abusive with passing months. Attila, indeed.

If the subtitle were How to Create a Masochist, A Man of Genius would almost qualify as nonfiction. Ann’s mother has hated her from birth, literally slapping her for daring to open her mouth, while lionizing Gilbert, the father who died before the poor girl was born. So of course Ann finds the most criminally narcissistic man available, violent and sullen by turns, and attaches herself obsessively.

We’ve all known someone like Robert, but, I hope, have had the sense to avoid them and, even more important, the self-respect to resist their gravitational pull. Since masochists believe they have no gravity—or more precisely, that its laws benefit them only on sufferance—reading about such people drives me absolutely crazy. In fact, when I reached the rather too lengthy part when Robert spouts dull, pretentious drivel, and his friends lap it up, I realized that I’d tried reading A Man of Genius once before, and that this section had persuaded me to put the book aside.

But this time, I kept going and was rewarded. An ardent feminist, Todd has much to say about the peripheries in which women reside, either for safety’s sake or because men have displaced them from more comfortable, visible quarters. Yet she never pretends that by definition, women are superior, or men, evil, and she sketches out the limits of discourse and understanding between the sexes with a sure hand. The context is historical, yet you get the picture–not as much has changed as we might like to think.

Also, though Todd dares literary cliché by having her characters move to Venice to try to escape themselves, she describes that city so masterfully that you forget you’ve read a dozen other novels about it. Further, the trip to Venice prompts Ann to delve into secrets from her past, which kicks the storytelling into a higher gear, and whose twists and reversals keep you guessing until the end.

Where A Man of Genius falls short, I think, is the dynamic between Ann and Robert. I like novels that render each emotional moment with care—one reason I stayed with this one—but too often here, the psychological currents swirl in tight circles. Robert never gives Ann a reason to think that he cares for her or enjoys her company, for which she blames herself. I’d have believed this part more readily—and skimmed less—had he doled out morsels that tantalized her, only to withhold them otherwise.

That would have positioned Ann as coming back for more rather than holding onto nothing, and her self-blame would have been easier to swallow. It would have also made her initial attraction more plausible; other than her own pathology, I can’t figure out why she’d bother.… (mehr)

Todd, Janet. The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. Second Edition. Cambridge UP, 2015.
Janet Todd has written an insightful set of interpretive essays on the novels of Jane Austen, but it is a collection best read after one has read the novels. This Cambridge Introduction, then, is not so much a preparation to read the novels but perhaps a preparation to reread them. There is no new biographical research here, so the first chapter that deals with the life and times of the author seems thin. I did not find much new in the discussion of Northanger Abbey, and the last chapter that covers our current Jane Austen Industry seems thrown together. Perhaps it was a needed justification to publish a second edition. It would be interesting to compare the cinematic approaches to Austen’s novels, but there is no mention of Emma Thompson’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility or Joe Wright’s treatment of Pride and Prejudice. Todd is on solider ground in discussing the novels themselves. She points out, for instance, that most of the characters in Sense and Sensibility display both the title qualities in different degrees and that in Pride and Prejudice, the two title terms become harder to distinguish as the novel progresses. In discussing Mansfield Park, Todd explains that Austen was aiming at a different audience than she was in Pride and Prejudice, which may account for its less comic tone. Turning to Emma, I was amused at Todd’s suggestion that Emma’s life as an adult would not have been much changed if she had not married Mr. Knightly, who unlike Darcy, is more cash-poor than his bride. Finally, in Persuasion, Todd finds Austen dramatizing the breakdown of the feudal order of the earlier novels. Wentworth, as a self-made man, is more like Bingley than Darcy but with no need to rent a house in the country. 4 stars.… (mehr)

Jane Austen and Shelley In the Garden is a difficult book to describe in a sentence. It’s a story of friendships new and old. Fran and Annie have been friends for most of their lives. They love each other even though they also irritate each other. When Fran visits Annie she meets some of her new friends, Shelley enthusiasts. Somehow Annie’s friends, Thomas and Rachel, decide to go to Wales to see the places Percy Blythe Shelley lived when he was young and newly married. Fran, who was born there is eager to go with them. Thomas is a Shelley expert and Rachel is a writer/teacher who also likes Shelley and Thomas, though she is closer in age to Fran and Annie. Fran is a bit of an interrupter, though they don’t know that much of the time her nonsequiturs are overheard conversations with her personal haunt, Jane Austen.

Despite the occasional irritations, the group, this time including Annie and a grad student named Yasmin travel to Venice to see where Shelley lived and died. They tell the stories, the great tragedies of his marriage and children’s deaths. Shelley was not a nice man. They share more of their sorrows and grief.

Jane Austen and Shelley In the Garden is not for everyone. The action is limited despite their traveling adventures. This is a story about conversation and companionship. The conversations are delightful. The writing is beautiful. The plot is of minor interest compared to the conversation. But what conversation, about great literature, poetry, academics, and life. There really doesn’t need to be more with this talented writer.

Janet Todd does not write easy books, but they are grand.

Jane Austen and Shelley In the Garden will be released on September 7th. I received an ARC from the publisher, Fentum Press.

Jane Austen and Shelley In the Garden at GoodReads
Janet Todd author site
Don’t You Know There’s a War On? review

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2021/08/29/9781909572287/… (mehr)