Abstract
In 2005, Nina Bawden published a series of letters to her dead husband, Austen Kark, who was killed in the Potters Bar train crash. The letters explain the legal wrangles that followed the inquest into the accident and chronicle her attempts to cope with her anger and grief. The title of the work, Dear Austen, suggests that he is its only possible reader, as well as the only (impossible) recipient of her epistles – ‘I wish you could answer this’, ends the third letter.1 Yet the publishers, Virago, must have realized that the title also suggested a wider audience. So synonymous is Austen with Jane Austen that it was difficult to tell, encountering the book on the shelf in Waterstone’s, whether it was under B for Bawden or A for Austen. Some unconscious urge on the part of the bookseller or the browser would like to make it something other than it is, to transform it into another kind of posthumous correspondence.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Nina Bawden, Dear Austen (London: Virago, 2005), p. 23.
Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice [1984] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 119. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text.
Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on The Purloined Letter’, in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psycho-analytic Reading, ed. by John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 28–54 (p. 91).
Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 137 and 138.
W.H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, in Collected Poems, ed. by Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1991), p. 83.
Robert Chapman, Jane Austen’s Letters to Cassandra and her family, ed. by Robert Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. xlii.
Carol Houlihan Flynn, ‘The letters’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen ed. by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 100–14 (p. 100).
Tony Tanner, Jane Austen, rev. edn [1987] (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 1–2.
Marianne MacDonald to the editor, London Review of Books, 17.16, 24 August 1995, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v17/n15/terry-castle/sister-sister (accessed 1 July 2010).
This is the word used by Chapman’s publishers and repeated in a letter by Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, 29 November 1932, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol V: The Sickle Side of the Moon, ed. by Nigel Nicholson (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), p. 131.
Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, 20 November 1932, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol V: The Sickle Side of the Moon, ed. by Nigel Nicholson (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), p. 127.
Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, 29 November 1932, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol V: The Sickle Side of the Moon, ed. by Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), p. 131.
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, ed. by Lorna Sage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 64.
See Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen at sixty’, New Republic, 37 (1924), 261; her vision of Austen as the ‘maiden aunt’ who cannot be questioned reappears in ‘Jane Austen’, in The Common Reader (London: Hogarth, 1925). For a full account of Woolf’s allusions to Austen in her fiction, see Janet Todd, ‘Who’s afraid of Jane Austen?’, in Jane Austen: New Perspectives (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), pp. 107–27.
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, ed. by Lorna Sage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 249.
Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, 20 November 1932, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol V: The Sickle Side of the Moon, ed. by Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), p. 127.
Virginia Woolf to Janet Case, 13 June 1928, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf III: A Change in Perspective, ed. by Nigel Nicholson (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 509.
See a description of their correspondence in Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997), which ‘gave [Woolf] permission to speak out with greater directness about her own life’ (596).
Virginia Woolf, Letter to a Young Poet (London: Hogarth Press, 1932), p. 5.
Deirdre Le Faye, ‘Preface to the third edition’, in Jane Austen’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. xvii.
Virginia Woolf to David Cecil, 23 March 1936, in Leave the Letters till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1936–1941, ed. by Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), p. 22.
Virginia Woolf to R.W. Chapman, 20 November 1936, in Leave the Letters till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1936–1941, ed. by Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), p. 87.
See Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), p. 263 and The Court and the Castle: A Study of the Interaction of Political and Religious Ideas in Imaginative Literature (London: Macmillan, 1958), p. 143.
Rebecca West to Alison Selford, 21 July 1975, in Selected Letters of Rebecca West, ed. by Bonnie Kime Scott (London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 454.
Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper (London: Virago, 1979), p. 186. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text.
Stevie Smith, ‘Edwardian energy’, Spectator, 13 March 1959, reprinted in Me Again, ed. by Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago, 1981), pp. 194–5 (p. 195).
See Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 296.
Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 3 January 1801, in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. by Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 68.
Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper (London: Virago, 1979), p. 152.
Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 15 June 1808, in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. by Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 125.
Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 165.
Patricia Beer, ‘Jane Austen at the Window’, in Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998), p. 113.
Virginia Woolf to Margaret Llewellyn Davies, 16 November 1919, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf II: The Question of Things Happening, ed. by Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 399.
Jane Austen to Cassandra Esten Austen, 8 January 1817, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. by Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 324.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 William May
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
May, W. (2012). Letters to Jane: Austen, the Letter and Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing. In: Dow, G., Hanson, C. (eds) Uses of Austen. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137271747_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137271747_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33999-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-27174-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)