Author: irispearso

In Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century, Christina Lupton presents reading as not merely part of an education which is a means to an end, but as a necessary and even enjoyable activity in its own right. Unfolding from Helen Small’s argument about the relationship between reading and happiness as it is expressed in the writings of John Stuart Mill, Lupton proposes one possibility for the purpose of reading:

            The point is not about books as a source of pleasure or continuity, but about the way they allow one to parse discontinuity. Conjuring up books to explain moments of change, Mill relies on them as tools in hinging the disparate parts of his life together.[1]

What intrigues me in Lupton’s words is the idea that books ‘allow one to parse discontinuity’. ‘To parse’ is ‘to describe the syntactic role of a word in a sentence or a phrase’ (OED): to position and explain one element in relation to the other parts of the system. While in Mill’s case this discontinuity is the gap between individual and general happiness, for the eighteenth-century female reader discontinuity is the problem confronted in the attempts to navigate society: the problem of etiquette, the protocol of gender dynamics, and the language which accompanies these questions. Books provide a solution of sorts: a skeleton of a model of how to make one’s way through this social world so that the reader is no longer free-falling.

            Both Small and Lupton write about the influence of books on Mill as a grown man, but the continuous present in Lupton’s verb ‘hinging’ proposes an ongoing motion, a progress which is experienced especially by another figure: the young woman. While Lupton’s argument might not seem so radical to a twenty-first century reader, to a daughter of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, to look first to the author for explanation and guidance would have been perhaps surprising and unexpected. It would be more usual, rather, for the daughter to look towards a maternal figure, whether that be the mother or, in her absence, another close female filling the maternal role. Yet to insist on treating the two voices of mother and author separately would be to wildly misunderstand this period, and it is the relationship between female reading and the mother that I will explore in this essay. I am interested in the interactions between them: the substitution of an inevitably absent mother for reading of romance and novels as the structuring principle of the daughter’s life, but also the eventual victory of motherhood, albeit in a different guise and within a frame of reference which considers the readers of these readers. I will try to make sense of the steps of the dance between the absent mother and reading, tracking the result of each movement and each still-point in between.

            Following Joe Bray’s model, my thinking focuses on the ‘intradiegetic’ reader: that is, the reader in rather than the reader of the text.[2] I will turn to a number of novels to elucidate my argument in this period, from Charlotte Dacre’s first-person-narrated Confessions of the Nun of St Omer to Charlotte Lennox’s semi-satirical The Female Quixote, but focusing primarily on Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a work which captures the complexities of the interaction between the absent mother and reading. The first pages of Northanger Abbey engage with a discontinuous form of reading in their proposition of fragmented quotations ‘which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives’, and thus from the very opening of her novel Austen emphasises the imposed structures (or lack of them) with which Catherine is faced and which she must use to guide her growing up.[3] From the opening of Austen’s novel, society poses a problem of discontinuity which must be parsed.

            Catherine Morland’s mother, almost unprecedentedly for Austen, who usually represents mothers in their undeniable absence, is satirically present in this opening: ‘instead of dying in bringing [Catherine] into the world, as any body might expect, she still lived on’ (Northanger Abbey, p5). There are a number of problems with this maternal presence, and this sentence of introduction poses the first: in negating the death of Catherine’s mother Austen brings it to the front of the reader’s mind, painting an image of the maternal corpse through her very erasure of it. In a way, then, Austen kills off Catherine’s mother on this first page in much the same way as she disposes of Emma Woodhouse’s mother outside the scope of the narrative, or Fanny Price’s mother when her daughter moves to live at Mansfield Park and she remains at home.

            It is Jocelyn Harris who most aptly describes the behaviour of Catherine’s mother with her phrase ‘haphazard instruction’.[4] The role of the mother in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had education at its core, in particular the education of daughters, as the sons of the middle and higher classes would most often go to school to learn while the daughters stayed at home with their mothers.[5] Anna Barbauld’s Lessons for Children appears to provide a model for maternal education.[6] As the child’s questions become broader and more curious, the mother begins to teach her young son not just about the page in front of him and how he should read from it and not tear it, but about the world beyond: together they watch the butterflies, and she explains how the cat cannot speak.

            Throughout Clara Reeve’s ‘Progress of Romance’ and Erasmus Darwin’s A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools, too, there is a focus on the necessity of a guide in reading: someone who can tell these girls and young women what they should read and how they should read it. In Reeve this is phrased as an admonishment to parents who are not sufficiently protecting their children from the romanticised perspective caused by reading certain ‘dangerous books for youth, – they create and encourage the wildest excursions of imagination, which it is, or ought to be, the care of parents and preceptors to restrain, and to give them a just and true representation of human nature, and of the duties and practice of common life.’[7] Darwin’s tone is perhaps less instructive and more explanatory, and centres necessarily on the figure of the governess as a substitute for the inevitably absent mother:

            Much therefore depends on the conduct of the governess in this respect, so long as they are under the eye of a judicious monitor, no real harm could probably arise from their feeling human nature in all the classes of life, not only as it should be, or as it may be imagined to be, but as it really exists, since without comparison there can be no judgment, and consequently no real knowledge.[8]

The figure that Darwin evokes here is importantly a ‘monitor’, watching but not immediately stepping in, accepting the possibility of a productive comparison between fictional and real worlds; the mode of protection here is presented as a not-necessarily-realised potential even as Darwin emphasises its meticulous intensity in the omniscient surveillance of ‘monitor’. In contrast to these images of careful and close engagement, Catherine’s mother lets her daughter spend her childhood ‘rolling down the green slope at the back of the house’ and reading whichever books she chooses, usually ‘all story and no reflection’ (Northanger Abbey, p7-8). Intellectual and corporeal freedom seem to go hand in hand here, an argument which mirrors Jacqueline Pearson’s suggestion that in his satirical novel Shamela ‘[Henry] Fielding uses Shamela’s library as a coded language for her body and her character’; indeed in Austen’s opening the physical absence of Catherine’s mother reflects the lack of mental guidance which the daughter receives.[9]

            That is not to say that Catherine is alone, however; she is not the isolated, motherless daughter that Charlotte Lennox presents in The Female Quixote, a novel with which Austen’s letters prove she was familiar.[10] Lennox’s Arabella is given unfettered access to her deceased mother’s reading material, but the books are presented to her within the legitimised masculine space of the library and not within their original context of the female space of her mother’s closet. Thus their purpose is unconsciously reshaped, and these romances become Arabella’s very model for life: ‘her Ideas, from the Manner of her Life, and the Objects around her, had taken a romantic Turn; and, supposing Romances were real Pictures of Life, from them she drew all her Notions and Expectations’.[11] The books come, then, to replace the absent mother in Arabella’s childhood, presenting her with a vision of the world which she can use to live. This idea of substitution is one which Jacques DuBoscq addresses in The Compleat Woman:

            For as Mothers upon viewing Some extraordinary Object, often leave the Marks thereof upon their Infants, why should we not believe that the lascivious Stories in Romances may have the same effect upon our Language, and that they always leave behind them Some Spots upon the Soul.[12]

DuBoscq pulls together mother and Romance through the permanent effect they have on their offspring, whether that offspring is a child or language. Carolyn Dever comes instead from the perspective of the child’s psychology, exploring the desire to find a replacement for the mother when she is either temporarily or permanently absent, even if the replacement is always aware of and indeed defined by its position as substitute and as a mere representation which pales next to the original form it represents:

            In Victorian novels, representations of maternal loss produce structures of displacement and operate as examinations of the objects substituted in the breach: servants and siblings, father, friends, lovers, orphanages, and texts – tombstones, letters, wills – all of which stand in a profoundly secondary relationship to the original lost, maternal object.[13]

            Austen explores the mother-lover substitution when Emma Woodhouse responds to the double loss of mother and governess (the latter deserts her, Emma feels, by getting married) by immediately steeping herself in preoccupations about marriage, perhaps denying her own desire for Knightley but projecting this onto Harriet as she attempts to find a husband for her new friend.[14] It is the mother-text substitution, however, that is at the centre of my thinking. Catherine’s reading does not directly replace the maternal role but creates a new model of guidance: one based predominantly around the power dynamics of gender. The first man with whom Catherine talks about books is John Thorpe, and his attitude is condescendingly critical, calling novels ‘the stupidest things in creation’ (Northanger Abbey, p47). The superlative in his statement gives the illusion of undeniability: Thorpe’s opinion, as a man, should be taken as certain fact. It is difficult to take John Thorpe seriously, it must be said (the fact that he cannot come up with a more meaningful adjective than ‘stupid’ must be read as Austen’s attempt to ridicule his character), but this does not invalidate his attempts to impose his own vision of female reading onto Catherine. She is left uncertain as to whether she should follow his opinion or her own. Charlotte Dacre’s character of Freibourg in her Confessions of the Nun of St Omer seems to embody this dilemma of the female protagonist: at first the reader is encouraged to view him positively, as a necessary guide to Cazire’s reading, and someone against whom she can test what she reads through intellectual conversation. He pushes against her romanticising tendencies: ‘but remember, Cazire, that real life, and life depicted in romance, are widely different’.[15] As the novel develops, however, Freibourg’s speeches become longer and longer, and his mode of advising becomes patronising even to the point of controlling Cazire’s every interpretation of the books she reads. Freibourg’s relationship with Cazire is an adulterous one, and so his control of her reading seems to be synonymous with his sexual selfishness and even with corruption – and yet, simultaneously, with the inevitability of masculine authority.

            Anna Barbauld, a proto-narratologist in the eyes of Anne Mellor[16], writes about the polemic purpose of novels in an essay ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’: they ‘take a tincture from the learning and politics of the times, and are made use of successfully to attack or recommend the prevailing systems of the day’.[17] It is not this depiction of the novel as making sense of complex systems, but another of Barbauld’s images which strikes me as most appropriate to describe reading in Northanger Abbey: a sense of the novel form as providing ‘domestic pleasure’.[18] While Harris, writing about Barbauld as Jane Austen’s ‘unseen interlocutor’, sees these two images as going hand in hand, she looks at pleasure merely through the way it can arise from a desire for the revolutionary and the intellectual. In the context of the women in Northanger Abbey, who drown themselves in leisure and whose only purpose is presenting themselves at various social events, I would be inclined to consider pleasure in its more indulgent terms, as pleasure for pleasure’s sake; in this light, then, Barbauld seems to contradict herself as to the defining characteristics of novel-reading. Claudia Johnson acknowledges this possible contradiction but reads the idea of novelistic pleasure as granting permission for her argument for the political purpose of the novel, suggesting that Barbauld’s certainty about the novel as only fiction and art removes the immediacy of political result from reading. Johnson’s interpretation recognises a clash of purpose but her understanding of the nuances of political change move her away from a discussion of contradiction and towards a kinder sense of simultaneity.[19] I would go further than Johnson, however, and argue that the conditions of reading in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries force us to look at the domestic pleasure of reading as enacted by women in the home as separate from the reading of the intellectually and politically empassioned citizen.

            Certainly in Northanger Abbey, Austen positions reading in the context of female domestic leisure; Isabella Thorpe’s description of Miss Andrews tells us about her extensive reading of Gothic novels and her skill at ‘netting herself the sweetest cloak you can conceive’ in almost the same breath (Northanger Abbey, p37). Reading here is absorbed into the span of female domestic time and becomes just another activity for the woman who sits at home and waits for the men to come home from work. In this way, then, reading seems to reinforce social structures, rather than breaking them open and subjecting them to examination as Barbauld’s statement likes to imagine. Perhaps the discrepancy lies in what exactly Barbauld and Austen are looking at. That is to say, the former considers reading in its ideal terms, in a vacuum, and so the achievements she celebrates do not take into account the personalities, individual emotions and outside factors which might affect a reader. Austen, on the other hand, dramatizes her theories of reading and so thinks about reading in its domestic contexts and with its diverse and unruly effects. It is not just symbolic of maternal absence, but becomes itself a character in this study, expressing its own opinion on how best to negotiate the world. Reading, or rather how reading is carried out and then expressed to others, becomes something which provides its own answer to the question of how to parse discontinuity, speaking over the answer offered (or not offered) by the mother.

            While Cazire might fall for the supposed necessity of male domination – and Dacre’s novel certainly seems to, as its first-person narrative follows closely the mind of her protagonist – and Catherine might at first listen to every word that John Thorpe says ‘with all the civility and deference of the youthful female mind, fearful of hazarding an opinion of its own in opposition to that of a self-assured man’, Austen’s novel as a whole does not subscribe to this newly-presented rule of male literary authority (Northanger Abbey, p47). That is to say, while Catherine’s reading only reasserts for her the structures of society in all their imperfection and imbalance, Austen presents a different possibility which pushes against the models proposed both by the absent mother and texts that come to replace her (and even to thrive in her absence). The new possibility which Austen presents pivots around a question which is central also to the voice of society against which it reacts: gender, and the relations between gender. Perhaps this is because the romances that Catherine reads act, as Laurie Langbauer puts it, as a ‘lightning rod for the anxieties about gender at the heart of every depiction of the sexes’.[20] Romance condenses, emblematises and projects a relationship between male and female which is often not, as becomes apparent through the behaviour of John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey or Freibourg in Confessions,so far from reality, but which crucially encourages Catherine, by the fact of its being depicted in literature, not to question the gender relations that she comes up again in her own social world.

            Discontinuity is parsed through two different strands of this gendered approach. Firstly, Austen offers a different model of male power through Mr Tilney. Henry Tilney echoes John Thorpe’s language when he says, ‘the person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid’, twisting what was, in Thorpe’s mouth, an assertion of male power into praise of reading as androgynously enriching (Northanger Abbey, p118). There is a specificity to Tilney’s way of speaking both here and in the subsequent conversation in which he deconstructs and discusses Catherine’s use of the words ‘nice’ and ‘amazing’, questioning their validity and helping her towards more precise speech, and this specificity contrasts both with the haphazard rule of Catherine’s mother as we see it at the start of the novel and with the depiction of John Thorpe and his unproven presumption of male authority (Northanger Abbey, p119). Dacre in Confessions presents a similar model in the character of St Elmer but, just as with Freibourg, what at first is or appears to be helpful quickly becomes oppressive, as Cazire’s beloved chooses himself the books she should read and even reads them aloud to her. In Patricia Howell Michaelson’s words, then, he takes advantage of the orator’s position of power to ‘censor texts and guide their interpretation’; in much the same way Edmund in Mansfield Park reads Shakespeare to Fanny and so drives her understanding in one particular direction. Whereas Mr Tilney praises the reading-act and encourages Catherine’s reading, St Elmer takes over this female reading as his own and excludes Cazire from it – and she is so caught up in a whirlwind of awe at being beloved by him that she cannot see this reality.

            The second strand of Austen’s strategy to parse discontinuity involves presenting a different kind of female model: a new kind of heroine. Erasmus Darwin’s text, by looking at education in boarding schools, considers not mothers (their absence is a given in this setting) but governesses, and by replacing one female figure with another he emphasises the necessity of a female model in the young woman’s making sense of the world. It is Miss Tilney who fills this role in Northanger Abbey. She is a new kind of heroine, who ‘seem[s] capable of being young, attractive, and at a ball, without wanting to fix the attention of every man near her, and without exaggerated feelings of ecstatic delight or inconceivable vexation on every little trifling occurrence’ (Northanger Abbey, p57). She does not sacrifice her femininity or appear vulgar or fall short of being the ideal young and attractive woman, and yet she does not give herself over to the romantic expectations, the fixed idea of beauty and heroism established in the novels that Catherine reads so voraciously.

            I draw attention, however, not just to the contents of Austen’s description here, but also to her narrative style. Daniel Gunn rejects a vision of free indirect discourse and authoritative narrative as separate and writes instead about the coexistence of the two – ‘rather than operating autonomously or freeing themselves from narratorial discourse, Austen’s free indirect discourse passages are embedded in this discourse’ – and this intertwining is exactly what is at play in Austen’s description of Eleanor Tilney.[21] Her heroic characteristics (‘young, attractive, and at a ball’) form the authoritative narrative, insofar as they describe facts about Miss Tilney’s self, but these are framed by the fragments of free indirect discourse which follow (‘wanting to fix the attention of every man near her…’). The ‘without’ which joins these two is both part of the authoritative narrative in its negation of the illusions of reading which Catherine has taken on, but also acts as a boundary between the two, highlighting that the one is defined by the other and that the new vision of a heroine in Eleanor Tilney is established not as an explicit contrast to, but within the context of, the old models which Austen is striving to deconstruct. This structure is apparent throughout Northanger Abbey, where what appear to be the narrator’s intrusions of staid realism are in fact descriptions expressed in terms of the illusions she is hoping to scatter: ‘neither robbers nor tempests befriended them, nor one lucky overturn to introduce them to the hero’; ‘not one, however, started with rapturous wonder on beholding her, no whisper of eager inquiry ran round the room, nor was she once called a divinity by any body’ (Northanger Abbey, p13; p18). The discontinuity created by society but also that caused by reading is parsed within the sentence: that is to say, the statement of its role is only relevant in the wider context of the grammatical construction of which it is a part. The solution to discontinuity is found and positioned not outside the circumstances that generate it, but within them.

            In these latter examples, the voice of the narrator shines through, as she attempts to correct Catherine’s warped perspective. I use the feminine pronoun here, and thus disagree with D.A. Miller and Roy Pascal who write about the narrator of Austen’s novels as a Nobody, ambiguous and, most importantly, androgynous.[22] Such a vision underplays the specificity of what Austen negates in these passages from Northanger Abbey. There is an emotional intensity to ‘rapturous wonder’ which expresses the warm feeling of being watched and admired, and the peculiar verb in ‘neither robbers nor tempests befriended them’ captures the contradictory ambiguity of the woman’s feeling towards such disasters: she is at once distressed and somehow pleased by them, because they moved her nearer to becoming a romantic heroine. My argument instead falls in line, then, with another of Pascal’s theories about the novel’s narrator: that Austen’s novels depict characters who belong to one class and one cultural world (implicitly, also Austen’s) and therefore their thoughts and feelings are no mystery to the narrator.[23] The narrator, I suggest, understands and expresses Catherine’s thoughts and feelings in a way that is not genderless but explicitly gendered. As she imposes her voice onto the novel, guiding Catherine through these negations of illusion in the interaction between free indirect discourse and authoritative narrative, Austen becomes a mother-narrator, not an androgynous guiding figure but one explicitly defined by and significant because of her gender.

            While Austen’s voice imposes itself as the authoritative narrative voice in these passages about Catherine, in the descriptions of Eleanor Tilney, which I explored above, it is the facts of Eleanor Tilney’s self which themselves push against romantic illusions. Eleanor Tilney has already achieved the balance of vision which Austen is trying to impose (and which the Countess in Lennox’s The Female Quixote has also reached, as she is able to enjoy reading romances and yet grasp that ‘the same Actions which made a man a Hero in those Times, would constitute him a Murderer in These’).[24] Perhaps, then, Eleanor Tilney is in fact the heroine of Austen’s novel. It is Eleanor, and not Catherine, who lives in the Abbey after which the novel is named, and in the context of an exploration of mothers in Austen’s text, it is significant that it is Eleanor’s mother who is the focus of the novel’s Gothic second half. It is Mrs Tilney who is at the centre of Henry Tilney’s story and Catherine’s illusions and dark adventures in the house; she has a lasting impact on the novel’s action in a perhaps more obvious way than Mrs Morland. And yet Catherine remains Austen’s heroine, and this, I would argue, stems from the fact that Eleanor Tilney has already worked out how to parse discontinuity. Catherine and Eleanor do not discuss books together, and it is with Isabella Thorpe that Catherine enacts the socialising power of reading that Pearson expresses when she describes the way in which reading was ‘idealised as the basis for the formation of community’[25]: ‘if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together’ (Northanger Abbey, p33). Eleanor does not need to turn to books to work out how to deal with the complexities of the world, as the confidence and certainty of her behaviour in the ballroom evidences.

            It is the character of Eleanor Tilney, then, who lies behind Austen’s expression of her own vision of the novel at the end of Chapter Five: ‘some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’ (Northanger Abbey, p34). The superlatives here propose literature as an expression of an extreme; the novel presents the extraordinary and the unexpected, not the ordinary and everyday. The description here is unusually separated from both character or dramatic scene and yet the voice is not that of the mother-narrator that characterises Austen’s voice throughout the novel. In this passage Austen promotes the novel beyond Catherine’s story and asserts it in the context of Eleanor Tilney’s instead: the latter has reached a position where reading is no longer necessary and therefore one where she can read once more. There is no risk that Eleanor Tilney will be led astray by the false security of structuring principle that reading offers her, and she can now indulge the richness, variety and power of literature: it is this possibility of reintroduction to reading, symbolised by Eleanor, with which Austen engages at this point in the novel. This shift from Catherine to Eleanor reflects intriguingly onto the question of Austen’s intended audience in Northanger Abbey; while until this point she has directed her corrections towards Catherine and her experience of discontinuity, here Austen seems to address a wider group of readers: all of the young female readers who have picked up her novels. She acts as a mother-narrator to Catherine but, this passage suggests, also to her own readers, warning them against the romantic illusions generated by reading, and helping them to parse the discontinuity which so characterises their lives as young women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

            Perhaps, then, I am looking in the wrong place when I consider Catherine as the example of an early nineteenth-century female reader with which Austen works. Perhaps what Austen is trying to emphasise is not the story of Northanger Abbey and the characters that move within it, but the textuality of her own novel, written for readers who also need to work out how to react to and explain change, and ‘hinge the disparate parts of [their lives] together’. Austen might do away with the mother figure at the beginning of Northanger Abbey, but her own narrative voice helps the maternal to resurface and ensures that, in the end, it is the mother’s authority which reigns. It is the maternal which stretches through each of these positions of reading, acting as the mirror which begets the ‘doubling’ of experience, as Adela Pinch writes, where the readers outside and inside the text are affected similarly by the narrative voice:[26] here the voice is that of the mother-narrator.

            This interpretation is laid bare by the double agedness of Northanger Abbey, which Austen began writing in her youth but did not publish until 1818. Austen rewrote parts in this gap so that it is difficult to conclude whether the novel should be classified among Austen’s earlier or later work.[27] The fact that Austen could return to Catherine’s story after so many years seems to deny significance to the latter’s individual experience, casting Austen’s female protagonist rather as a case study: she embodies an exploration both of the possible ways of parsing discontinuity that reading can propose as an alternative to those created by the mother, and also of the possibility of their failure. What remains throughout all of Austen’s ambiguity and uncertainty, the oscillations in her presentation of female reading, is the narrative voice guiding Catherine, shaping and reshaping her perspective on a world which is so brightly new to her. When Catherine’s mother falls short, it is Austen who steps in to provide a model for the young heroine; in the absence of a natural mother, the narrative mother is there to hold her hand. Chaos becomes structure; uncertainty clears to understanding; discontinuity is parsed.

Works Cited:

Primary texts:

Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, ed. by P.D. James (London: Penguin Vintage Classics, 2014)

Austen, Jane, Emma (London: Penguin Classics, 1996)

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, Lessons for Children from Two to Three Years Old (London: printed for J. Johnson, 1787)

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing (first published in 1800), in Congress Library Online, https://ia800308.us.archive.org/15/items/onoriginprogress00barb/onoriginprogress00barb.pdf [accessed 9th December 2018]

Burney, Francese, Evelina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968)

Cervantes, Miguel, Don Quixote, trans. by Edith Grossman (London: Penguin Vintage, 2005)

Dacre, Charlotte, Confessions of the Nun of St Omer (New York, NY: McGrath Publishing Company, 1972)

Darwin, Erasmus, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools, Private Families, and Public Seminaries (Philadelphia: John Ormrod: 1798)

Edgeworth, Maria, Belinda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)

Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote or The Adventures of Arabella, ed. by Margaret Dalziel, Margaret Anne Doody, Duncan Isles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966)

Reeve, Clara, The Progress of Romance (Colchester: W.Keymer, 1785)

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, The Rivals (Ilkley: Scolar Press, 1973)

Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. by Miriam Brody (London: Penguin, 1992)

Secondary texts:

Alliston, April, ‘Female Quixotism and the Novel: Character and Plausibility, Honesty and Fidelity’, The Eighteenth Century, 52.3/4: The Drift of Fiction: Reconsidering the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2011), 249-269

Armstrong, Nancy, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)

Bowers, Toni, The Politics of Motherhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Bray, Joe, The Female Reader in the English Novel: From Burney to Austen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009)

Clery, E.J., Women’s Gothic From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 2000)

Dever, Carolyn, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxieties of Origin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)

Freud, Sigmund, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. by Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin Classics, 2005)

Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (London: The Hogarth Press, 1971)

Gallagher, Catherine, ‘Nobody’s Credit: Fiction, Gender, and Authorial Property in the Career of Charlotte Lennox’ in Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 145-202

Gordon, Scott Paul, ‘The Space of Romance in Lennox’s Female Quixote’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 38.3: Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1998, 499-516

Gunn, Daniel, ‘Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma’, Narrative, 12.1 (2004), 35-54

Gurton-Wachter, Lily, ‘Reading: A Double Attention’ in Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), pp. 33-58

Harris, Jocelyn, ‘Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Jane Austen’s Unseen Interlocutor’ in Anna Laetitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, ed. by William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2014), pp. 237-258

Hoeveler, Diane Long, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalisation of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998)

Johnson, Claudia, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1995)

Johnson, Claudia, ‘“Let Me Make the Novels of a Country”: Barbauld’s “The British Novelists”’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 34.2, The Romantic Era Novel (2001), 163-179

Langbauer, Laurie, ‘Romance Revised: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 18.1 (1984), 29-49

Lupton, Christina, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2018)

McKeon, Michael, ‘Romance Transformations (I): Cervantes and the Disenchantment of the World’ in The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (United States: The John Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 273-294

Miller, D.A., Jane Austen or the Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)

Pascal, Roy, The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and its Functioning in the Nineteenth-Century European Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977)

Pearson, Jacqueline, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Pinch, Adela, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996)

Poovey, Mary, ‘From Politics to Silence: Jane Austen’s Nonreferential Aesthetic’ in A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (Chichester: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), pp. 249-260

Ross, Deborah, ‘Mirror, Mirror: The Didactic Dilemma of the Female Quixote’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 27.3: Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1987), 455-473

Small, Helen, ‘Socrates Dissatisfied: The Argument for a Contribution to Happiness’ in The Value of the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 89-124

Spacks, Patricia Meyer, ‘Subtle Sophistries of Desire: The Female Quixote’ in Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 12-33

Williams, Abigail, The Social Life of Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017)

Wyatt, Jean, Reconstructing Desire: The Role of the Unconscious in Women’s Reading and Writing (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 23-50

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[1] Christina Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2018), p65.

[2] Joe Bray, The Female Reader in the English Novel: From Burney to Austen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p24.

[3] Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. by P.D. James (London: Penguin Vintage Classics, 2014 (first published 1818)), p8. All further references to Northanger Abbey are quoted in-text and taken from this edition.

[4] Jocelyn Harris, ‘Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Jane Austen’s Unseen Interlocutor’ in Anna Laetitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, ed. by William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2014), pp. 237-258 (p241).

[5] Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p158.

[6] Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Lessons for Children from Two to Three Years Old (London: printed for J. Johnson, 1787). These lessons are written in the form of a conversation between a mother and her child, although only the mother’s words are recorded almost as a dramatic monologue.

[7] Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (Colchester: W.Keymer, 1785), Volume II, p14.

[8] Erasmus Darwin, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools, Private Families, and Public Seminaries (Philadelphia: John Ormrod: 1798), p49.

[9] Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p23.

[10] In a letter to Cassandra Austen in 1807, Jane Austen wrote of Lennox’s novel that ‘I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it’ (Jane Austen’s Letters, collected and ed. by Deidre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

[11] Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote or The Adventures of Arabella, ed. by Margaret Dalziel, Margaret Anne Doody, Duncan Isles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 (first published in 1752)), p7.

[12] Jacques Duboscq, The Compleat Woman (first published in 1639, trans. with this title in 1753), as quoted in Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p102. DuBoscq’s book is a theory of what makes the accomplished woman, and at this point he discusses the dangers of reproducing subjectivity, that is to say, of transmitting knowledge through reading, using physical imagery of sexual reproduction to express this psychological event.

[13] Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxieties of Origin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p4.

[14] Jane Austen, Emma (London: Penguin Classics, 1996 (first published in 1815)).

[15] Charlotte Dacre, Confessions of the Nun of St Omer (New York, NY: McGrath Publishing Company, 1972 (first published in 1805)), Volume I, p211.

[16] Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), p94. She is referring to Barbauld’s essay ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’ which appeared as an introduction to the collection The British Novelists (1810). William McCarthy, in his biography of Anna Barbauld (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), praises this collection not just for its narratological approach which seems to ‘[plot] a history of fiction from the earliest times to the present’ but also for its improvement on the ‘baggy’ collections which had come before: ‘the effect […] is of a great uncluttering, a radical simplification’ (p426).

[17] Anna Laetitia Barbauld, On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing (first published in 1800), in Congress Library Online (full reference in bibliography), p2.

[18] Barbauld, p47.

[19] Claudia Johnson, ‘“Let Me Make the Novels of a Country”: Barbauld’s “The British Novelists”’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 34.2, The Romantic Era Novel (2001), 163-179 (p170).

[20] Laurie Langbauer, ‘Romance Revised: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 18.1 (1984), 29-49 (p31).

[21] Daniel Gunn, ‘Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma’, Narrative, 12.1 (2004), 35-54 (p43). Gunn goes further than this and argues that free indirect discourse is an exercise of mimicry or imitation by the narrator, using the language of the character to voice events.

[22] D.A. Miller, Jane Austen or the Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Roy Pascal, The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and its Functioning in the Nineteenth-Century European Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977). Miller argues for the narrator as an embodiment of Absolute Style and so pushes for even greater disembodiment and impersonality.

[23] Pascal, p45. Pascal writes about this as part of his argument for Austen’s novels providing the perfect conditions for the ‘unhampered emergence of free indirect speech’.

[24] The Female Quixote, p328.

[25] Pearson, p96.

[26] Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p159.

[27] See, for example, Narelle Shaw’s essay on ‘Free Indirect Speech and Jane Austen’s 1816 revision of Northanger Abbey’, published in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 30.4: Nineteenth Century (1990), 591-601. Austen’s novel was locked away in the publisher’s cupboard for 20 years before Austen was able to access and rewrite it.

One of John Milton’s pithiest criticisms of Eikon Basilike comes at the beginning of his preface to his Eikonoklastes: he accuses the king’s book of ‘containing little else but the common grounds of tyranny and popery’.[1] To a Renaissance reader drilled in humanist practices of reading from their earliest school days, the phrase ‘common grounds’ would have had an undeniable resonance. Common ground is common territory, which is common place – communis locus – which becomes the practice of commonplacing and the commonplace book. A foundation of Renaissance humanist teaching championed by Erasmus and also by Milton himself in his 1644 essay ‘Of Education’, commonplacing was a method of reading which involved selecting extracts from texts and categorising these quotations and extracts under different headings and subheadings in a single book (although often in multiple volumes), to be used in writing different essays or pieces on these subjects.[2] Intertextuality, in this way, was inextricably connected to commonplacing; a reference to another text implied a quotation in the writer’s commonplace book. As Milton discusses texts that are mentioned either explicitly or implicitly in Eikon Basilike, then, he begins to construct an image of the titles on the bookshelf of King Charles I. I suggest that Milton gives us more than this imagined library, however, and that his criticism of the king goes beyond a comment on which texts he reads. I argue, through the apian metaphor for reading provided by multiple humanist writers, that Milton’s primary criticism lies in the static, aesthetic status that the king seems to give to the books he reads and that Milton himself, in Eikonoklastes, presents an alternative model for reading and working with texts.

            Perhaps the most discussed moment of intertextuality in Eikonoklastes (perhaps more accurately described as an intertextual moment from Eikon Basilike which Milton tears apart in Eikonoklastes) is ‘the Pamela prayer’. The words of this prayer, Milton tells us, although presented as the king’s own creation, have been lifted directly from Book Three, Chapter Six of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (Milton in his pedantry of argument quotes the exact page number): ‘a prayer stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen woman praying to a heathen god’ (Eikonoklastes, p327). The repetition of ‘heathen’ at the centre of this quotation is a reminder of the contrast between the king’s own Anglicanism and Pamela’s emphatic pagan-ness as Sidney presents her. Milton is critical of the ease with which the king seems to abandon his religion and the religious discourse which is supposedly so central to his position. The word ‘stolen’ is also significant, however, as it suggests an anger about the direct and deliberate lifting of material from one work to use in this book. The verbal object sits in exactly the same state in Eikon Basilike as it was in Arcadia.‘Stolen’ hints therefore at a creative poverty in the king, as he cannot come up with his own words but must take them from the mouth of another; Milton’s criticism at this point turns then on the possibility of plagiarism that is the result of misuse of the commonplace book.

            In Chapter I of Eikonoklastes, Milton focuses on the king’s familiarity with Shakespeare: ‘I shall not instance an abstruse author, wherein the King might be less conversant, but one whom we well know was the closest companion of these his solitudes, William Shakespeare’ (Eikonoklastes, p327). Milton’s own sonnet ‘On Shakespeare’, written nineteen years earlier, expresses an admiration for Shakespeare which discourages us from interpreting this line as Milton’s censure of the king specifically for his choice of author: in the sonnet he writes, ‘thou in our wonder and astonishment/ Hast built thyself a live-long monument’.[3] Milton’s objection cannot be located in Shakespeare’s name, then, so we must shift our gaze to the particular text to which he compares Eikon Basilike, and even more specifically, to the tone of this text: namely, the ‘high […] strain of piety and mortification’ of Richard III (Eikonoklastes, p327). It makes sense to read this comment on ‘high’ art in the context of a Milton’s later exclamation on the poetic style of Eikon Basilike:

           I began to think that the whole book might perhaps be intended a piece of poetry. The words are good, the fiction smooth and cleanly; there wanted only rhyme, and that, they say, is bestowed upon it lately. (Eikonoklastes, p357)

Although the description, out of context, could be read as a compliment of the king’s writing, the word ‘perhaps’ (corroborating Milton’s acknowledged disdain for rhyme) slips in a challenge to the writer of Eikon Basilike. His ironic comment raises the question: surely Charles does not want to claim that he should write such an important, polemical text as poetry?[4] The writer of Eikon Basilike has failed to tonally transform his reading, and instead has directly applied what he reads in Richard III to his own writing, turning his own defence into a piece of tragic fiction. The idea of transformation, more explicitly argued here, casts light back onto the ‘Pamela prayer’ to imply that what is reprehensible about the king’s theft of these words is not the act of taking them, but his lack of creativity in leaving them unaltered.

           Creativity is central to the practice of commonplacing, and this is expressed most clearly in the bee imagery which is present throughout humanist educational writing. Ann Moss picks out the different examples of the apian metaphor from Seneca to Heremias Drexelius and Desiderius Erasmus, whose most detailed image comes in his 1528 work Ciceronianus:

           Do bees collect the substance for making honey from just one shrub? Or do they not rather fly busily round every species of flower, grass, and shrub, often roaming far afield to gather material to store it in their hives? And what they bring back is not honey to start with. They turn it into a liquid by the action of their mouths and digestive organs, and having transformed it into themselves, they then bring it forth from themselves, in a form in which it is impossible to recognise the taste or scent of any flower or shrub from which the bee has sucked: what we have now is the product of the little bee itself, a compound of all that has gone to make that product up.^[5]

Images of production shift to those of change, transformation and digestion, suggesting that commonplacing is as much about adapting and recreating as it is about gathering and collecting. It is what you do with what you read that matters.

           It is on these terms of the transformed or, rather, untransformed that Milton takes on the king in Eikonoklastes. By quoting from Richard III in his own text as he comments on the king’s reading of Shakespeare Milton seems to artificially limit the range of his own bookshelf to that of the king’s. That is to say, he works from the assumption that kings are less learned – ‘most commonly not being the wisest or the worthiest by far of whom they claim to be governing’ (Eikonoklastes, p418) – and so it would be unfair of him to pit the king’s bookshelf against his own proper library. In Milton’s own commonplace book, in the section on ‘tyrannus’ (tyrant), he has collected extracts from William of Malmesbury, Raphael Holinshed, the French historian Richard Girard de Bury, Philip de Comines and Jacques Auguste de Thou; under the heading ‘rex’ (king) he takes from William Camden, Johannes Cuspinian, Carolus Sigonius, Justinian and Severus Sulpitius. While Milton’s commonplace book shows reading of a range of humanist writers and historians from both England and the continent, the king draws instead from Shakespeare, the playwright of the people, performed onstage to the masses and to whose plays almost everyone in the period would have had access as a groundling. Milton’s preface gives us clues to this wider reading. He displays his learned knowledge of the classics by quoting from Homer in the original Greek, and also refers (if obliquely) to kings of the past about whom he would have read in the work of historians such as Holinshed and Jacques Auguste de Thou. Not one of these writers makes an explicit appearance in Eikonoklastes, however: as a work dedicated to picking apart and proving the tyranny of the king, many of the quotations from the commonplace book would have been of productive use here. Milton refers instead, in the bulk of this work, to texts which are quoted or lie beneath Eikon Basilike. By limiting his own corpus of texts to those that the king reads, Milton shows that he is not interested in reading what is written on the spines of the books in the king’s library. He does not discount him as an unworthy literary opponent because he has not read certain texts. He casts the king aside, rather, for the way in which he reads.

           If the reader were to reconstruct Milton’s bookshelf, then, they would find it not dissimilar in contents to that of the king. The difference would be that Milton’s books are well-used, with phrases and extracts underlined and annotated until they have been understood, and only then copied out into the commonplace book. The insides of the books are showing; the outsides becomes irrelevant. The quotation from Homer’s Iliad which Milton uses in his preface to Eikonoklastes posits an awareness of this contrast between surface and depth, as it expresses the paradox of a person who appears to mourn for another, but really laments their own condition and ‘the loss of their own aspiring hopes’ (Eikonoklastes, p314-5).[6] Milton’s Eikonoklastes explores the importance of transforming the misleading exterior of the text into the true interior, by revealing what lies beneath and by interrogating this interiority, rather than focusing on the superficial. It is the intricacies of the small parts of words, and not just the tangible existence of the text, which must be deconstructed and re-formed into something entirely new and separate from the original.

           I have proposed a reading of Eikonoklastes which focuses on Milton’s attempts to build up a sense of the king’s bookshelf in the reader’s imagination: a sense which considers not just the appearance and existence of books, but also their meaning and how this is encountered and put to use by the reader. For Charles, as Milton would have us believe, the book is a frivolous object, a stage-prop whose symbolism hinges on its external existence and whose identity is immutable as something already created. For Milton, on the other hand, the significance of books goes beyond the aesthetic: they are as nectar, being the primary material which needs to be interrogated, interpreted and understood, and then transformed into something else. Milton recreates and recasts the words of others – Shakespeare, Sidney, and Homer – so that they have a congruent place in, and form his argument for, a new text, Eikonoklastes. Milton acts as a critic of Eikon Basilike, reading the king’s text in the same way I am now reading his: by working backwards from the intertextual moments to think about reading practices more generally. Milton reverses the processes to which the king subjects – or rather, does not but should subject – what he reads. What matters, then, in Milton’s eyes, is not the quality of the flower or which flowers are visited; rather the strength of the writing (and of the man) lies in the skill of the bee. Many read: but only readers who interrogate and transform read well.

Works cited:

Primary texts:

John Milton, Eikonoklastes in The Prose Works of John Milton: Volume I, ed. by J.A. St John (London: Bohn’s Standard Library, 1857).

Secondary texts:

Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

Francis Bacon, ‘Of Studies’ in Francis Bacon: Essays (London: J.M. Dent & Sons LTD, 1906, repr. 1943).

Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’ (1987) in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991, ed. by W. Speed Hill (New York: Renaissance English Text Society, 1993).

Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

Desiderius Erasmus, ‘De copia verborum’ and ‘De ratione studii’ in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24, ed. by Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978).

Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1977).

Nicole A. Jacobs, ‘John Milton’s Beehive, from Polemic to Epic’, Studies in Philology, 112.4 (2015), 798-816.

Warren H. Lowenhaupt, ‘The Writing of Milton’s Eikonoklastes’, Studies in Philology, 20.1 (1923), 29-51.

Elisabeth M. Magnus, ‘Originality and Plagiarism in Areopagitica and Eikonoklastes’, English Literary Renaissance, 21.1 (1991), 87-101.

Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

William Poole, ‘The Genre of Milton’s Commonplace Book’ in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. by Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University, 2009).

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[1] John Milton, Eikonoklastes in The Prose Works of John Milton: Volume I, ed. by J.A. St John (London: Bohn’s Standard Library, 1857), p309. All further references to Eikonoklastes are quoted in-text and taken from this edition.

[2] Ann Moss explores the range of ordering principles that were used in such books in her monograph Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

[3] Milton, ‘On Shakespeare’ in The Norton Anthology of Poetry: Third Edition (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company Inc, 1983).

[4] Milton’s disdain for rhyme is evident when he describes heroic couplets as ‘the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter’ in the Introduction to Paradise Lost.

[5] Erasmus, ‘Ciceronianus’ (1528) from P. Mesnard’s edition (Amsterdam, 1971), quoted in Ann Moss, p105. Italics mine.

[6] Translated by George Chapman in Homer, Iliad, ed. by Allardyce Nicoll (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), Volume II, Book XIX, line 302: ‘thus spake she weeping, and with her did th’other ladies moan/ Patroclus’ fortunes in pretext, but in sad truth their own’.