1756
When my kids were growing up, because it was a fun way of filling
up the emptiness of a long car journey, or a means of making that boring
activity a visit to an art gallery or museum a little less boring, we played a
game I had invented called "Spot The Derivative". Switch on Radio 3
and whatever happens to be playing is... they were both doing music at school,
one learning violin, the other wind instruments, and both a little bit of
piano, so the background was there. "Sounds like late Romantic" or
"has to be Mozart" might even turn into, "no, I know that, one
of my friends did it for her GCSE solo, that's Chopin." Or recognising the
use of light in a Rembrandt because we had been to the Caravaggio exhibition
the week before. Or my elder daughter, telephoning me one day in Toronto,
because she was in Reading with her mum and Jane Austen was the
next author on her A level syllabus. "I need something that will get me an
A-grade dad, something different from the standard essay everybody's going to
write." Which book, I asked her? "Sense and Sensibility".
So we talked about Charlotte Turner Smith and the "School
of Sensibility", which gave Wordsworth and Coleridge their "Lyrical
Ballads", but also Jane Austen her
title (see Oct 28), and mentioned, because
it would make a good footnote, that "Pride and Prejudice" was likewise
"borrowed", from Dr Lyster in Fanny Burney's "Cecilia" (see June 13); and then I sent her off
to do some research into Maria
Edgeworth, probably the authoress who had the greatest
impact on Jane (see Jan 1).
Three
days later she called again, wanting more. So we talked about the play at the
heart of "Mansfield Park", which Jane
had basically "lifted" from Elizabeth Inchbald's
"Lovers' Vows" (see Oct 15), and then about Elizabeth
Inchbald, who made her stage-name in a
production of the same play, though not in Jane
Austen's production (ditto
Oct 15).
But that was "Mansfield Park", and she was studying
"Sense and Sensibility", and so we talked about Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth
Fowler her birthname, born somewhere around 1693, and on this page because she died today, in 1756: an actress to begin with - at
the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin around 1714, then in London from 1717 - but
mostly a writer, very much of the hot passion genre in her novels, though intermingled,
indeed closely coupled with social and political commentary (Alexander Pope detested her, and it was probably just envy
of her skills); there were plays too, articles in periodicals, poetry, translations - she even became a publisher, founding and editing “The Female Spectator” (here and here) - and spot the
derivative of that title!
But
enough. As one who believes in autodidacticism, the importance of discovering
knowledge for oneself, I recommended my daughter to the Jane Austen Society's website, which states
unequivocally that
"Austen’s cyclical Eliza narratives in "Sense and Sensibility" owe a debt to the earlier highly patterned amatory plots of her predecessor Haywood, and each of Austen’s novels encodes and gestures towards the sort of seduction narratives that generated Haywood’s initial rise to fame."
Spot the derivative! You can read her full biography, and get the same A-grade that my daughter got, here.
Oh, and while you're pursuing the subject, you might want to look up the other two ladies in the picture at the top: left to right Fanny Burney, Eliza Haywood, Jane Collier, Jane Austen and Sarah Scott. Start here, which is where I found the picture.
You can find David Prashker at:
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https://www.facebook.com/TheArgamanPress
http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
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