Illustrating Jane's juvenilia.

McMaster, Juliet

IT ALL BEGAN WITH The Beautifull Cassandra (yes, spelt that way), and Jack Grey's New York JASNA AGM on the Juvenilia and Lady Susan at the Waldorf Astoria in 1987. I had delighted in Austen's youthful writings before that; but in re-reading them for the conference I fell in love--smash, barn, alacazam!--with the cheeky unrepentant Cassandra who elopes with a bonnet. There was something about that vigorous and pleasure-loving girl--devouring six ice creams at a sitting, knocking down the pastry-cook instead of paying for them, taking off on a gratuitous trip in a hackney-coach--that reminded me of Peter Rabbit and the carrots, and of Maurice Sendak's Max of Where the Wild Things Are ("Let the wild rumpus begin!") or Mickey of In the Night Kitchen ("I'm Mickey!"). I wanted the beautifull Cassandra to achieve incarnation in a picture book for kids. And because I've been a closet illustrator, I wanted to come out of the closet and make the pictures mine.

I turned Cassandra into a mouse, and the other characters into a lizard, a guinea pig, a frog, and a squirrel. After fitting in preliminary research and sketches with my life as a scholar and English Prof, I took two weeks off from all other duties, and drew and colored my pictures. And then I went to market with them.

It makes a difference, I think, that my serious engagement with Jane Austen's juvenilia began in this light-hearted way, with this charming and boisterous tale. Austen's early writings deserve serious scholarly attention, and I hope I have helped to make that happen through the Juvenilia Press editions and the essays I have written and further studies of others that I have edited. (1) I urged Jack Grey, for instance, to collect the papers at his New York conference into the collection Jane Austen: The Beginnings, which was the first thorough literary look at the content of what R. W. Chapman called The Minor Works. Jane Austen's own mood in the writing of this fierce and funny set of narratives, dedicated to her sister, brothers, parents, and friends, was playful and joyful.

How was I to bring that play and joy visibly to the pages of a picture book for kids? And how could one suggest in pictures the wonderful verbal precision that already characterizes this young author? I wanted a flowing but exact line, expressive gesture and attitude, vigor and movement and bright color. Turning the characters into small animals dressed in the fashions of the 1780s provided its own opportunity for visual fun and wit. For instance, I made the hackney-coachman's horse a tortoise; and when the frog coachman cracks his whip, the tortoise, safe it its shell, can look its amused immunity. (I write, necessarily, of my own intentions. How far I succeeded in fulfilling them is for others to judge.)

Austen's prose, we know, is finely economic. She packs a load of suggestion into a turn of phrase. And although the juvenilia are in so many ways different from the novels, the young Jane's prose already has this power of suggestion. An illustrator, like a film-maker, has the opportunity to expand the suggestion; and I relished my chance to visualize. The Beautifull Cassandra occupies only three pages in the Chapman edition; so in spreading the story with pictures to 30 pages, I could expatiate.

For instance: After Cassandra has appropriated the Duchess's bonnet to her own head, she sallies forth and meets a Viscount, who is "no less celebrated for his Accomplishments & Virtues, than for his Elegance & Beauty." Aha! thinks the trained romance reader, Here comes the Hero. But not in an Austen burlesque. Cassandra has other fish to fry. The text reads simply, "She curtseyed & walked on." In my pictures I could show more. I turned the Viscount into a lounge lizard, togged up in the finery of an eighteenth-century "macaroni" (in a pose borrowed from Rowlandson), and looking as snooty as possible with a nose pointing skywards. First picture shows them facing each other, with Cassandra's deep curtsey, eyes lowered. Next picture shows him solo, making his elaborate bow to nobody in particular. Last in the sequence shows him quite crestfallen, still dangling his tricorn, as he sees Cassandra now in the distance, having cheerfully passed by his display. He's the one with the pride and self-conscious status. She's the one with better things to do and more exciting places to go. That's the story I extract from the five words, "She curtseyed & walked on."

Cassandra's adventures occupy a day, from the moment she falls in love with the bonnet and elopes with it, though her cheerful indulgences in six ice creams and the trip to Hampstead, her coping with the importunate coachman and other encounters, back to her parental home and her indulgent milliner mother. It is episodic rather than causally driven. So to supply a visual unity of action I made the journey outward and back my story-board line. For the first part of the story, after the magical moment of falling in love, Cassandra moves from left to right, forwards like the written narrative line. At Hampstead, her destination in the hackney coach, "she was no sooner arrived than she ordered the Coachman to turn round & drive her back again." I took that as the mid-point of the story and rendered it in two silhouette compositions on one page, to mark the reversal. (Hampstead is identified by a vignette of Kenwood House in the background: I did some on-the-spot research for that!) For the rest of the story, until the gratifying stasis at the end, Cassandra moves back from right to left. Within this large pattern the rhythm changes briefly: for instance: there's a stalled moment while Cassandra searches her pockets for money to pay the importunate coachman. ("Importunate," I've been told, is a word that this story has added to the vocabulary of many a four-year-old.) And the climax of the action, as I take it, is her resourceful and hilarious device of plonking her now wrecked bonnet on his head and running away. Jane Austen's little text, written as it appears with such cheerful spontaneity, lends itself to these calculations. It is in fact a fine-tuned and shapely tale.

One problem I faced in turning the characters into small animals: What was to be the relation of the animals to the human world? Cassandra's mother, we hear, is a milliner, who makes a beautiful bonnet for a Duchess. Was the off-stage duchess also to be an animal?

I decided that there is a parallel world of human activity. Cassandra's mother was to be a mouse-milliner making bonnets for aristocratic human beings who remain off-stage. She is like the mice in Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester, who busy themselves in helping to sew an embroidered waistcoat for the human Mayor. A reel of thread serves her for a stool, and the needle she sews with is huge. How, then, does Cassandra the mouse, after falling in love with a human-size bonnet, manage to have "placed it on her gentle head" and sally forth? My decision was that the moment of falling in love effects a magical transformation, after which the bonnet fits her. Otherwise, to her the bonnets are the size of furniture. Before the action we see her swinging on the ribbons of a bonnet as on a swing; and when she has dumped the bonnet that becomes her Significant Other, she reverts to mouse size. She delivers her only piece of dialogue, the final satisfied "This is a day well spent," while flopped out in a sofa-sized bonnet, devotedly tended by her doting mother.

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The Beautifull Cassandra represents my only set of illustrations in full color, and since I'm most at home with line I saw color as a daunting challenge. For minor characters I limited the range: red to purple for the snobbish paternal rat, yellow through orange for the lounge lizard Viscount, yellow and green for the frog coachman, and so on. But my major characters, Cassandra and her sexy bonnet, come in the full range of primary colors, red and yellow and blue, with a purple pelisse thrown in. I wanted those two to be strong and dominant on the page.

When you illustrate a story, you have to think about it long and hard. The Beautifull Cassandra taught me much about the young Jane Austen and the themes and techniques she carried forward to the six novels. (Also, what she didn't carry forward.) And it was this process that made me realize that getting students to think long and hard about an author's early piece of writing was one vivid way to acquaint them with that author. In two undergraduate courses specialized to Jane Austen and the Brontes, I offered the students the topic of editing and illustrating a piece of juvenilia. We turned the class efforts into modest saddle-stitched volumes, and I found I could actually sell them. And from this germ grew my brainchild the Juvenilia Press, which produces scholarly (and illustrated!) editions of early works by known writers, with students working alongside experienced scholars to learn about textual editing, annotation, and writing a critical introduction. We've produced editions of early works by such authors as Alcott, Philip Larkin, and Margaret Atwood, besides those of Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Our books have always come with pictures, and ideally a talented student produces them. Different editors of our Austen volumes, however, have invited me to do the illustrations, and that's an invitation I find it hard to refuse.

For a series of JASNA AGMs, the Juvenilia Press has provided a parallel series of editions of Austen's juvenilia, all edited by distinguished scholars working with their students. Jan Fergus and her team from Lehigh University edited Lesley Castle, for distribution at the 1998 conference on Northanger Abbey at Quebec City. (The castle setting was entirely appropriate for a conference on that novel!) For the '2001 AGM at Seattle Joseph Wiesenfarth and his students at the University of Wisconsin edited Jack & Alice. Next came the early story Frederic & Elfrida, edited by Peter Sabot and his students at Laval University, and distributed at the Toronto AGM of 2002. I've just completed the pictures for The Three Sisters, another volume edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth and his students, ready for the 2004 conference in Los Angeles. And Christine Alexander has invited me to illustrate the edition of Lady Susan for the 2005 Milwaukee conference on "The Letters in Fiction and Fact."

With his memorable 1987 conference on the Juvenilia and Lady Susan, our co-founder Jack Grey really started something!

Just as I am more comfortable with line than color, so I tend to concentrate on figures and their attitudes and motions rather than their surroundings. Like Mary Crawford, who says she sees "no wonder in this shrubbery equal to seeing myself in it" (MP '209-10), I am anthropocentric: for me, it's the people who matter. I can defend this emphasis, of course: remember Charlotte Bronte's objection that Austen provides "no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no botany beck." (2) But for Lesley Castle, with settings in Bristol, Paris, and Portman Square in London, besides the Castle in Scotland, I felt I had to provide some markers for location. I included sketchy versions of Whitehall Palace for London (borrowed from Hogarth's "Rake's Progress" series), and Notre Dame for Paris (no Eiffel Tower in the 1790s). Since Lesley Castle is epistolary, and the designer Winston Pei provided lines to suggest sheets of letter paper, I designed "letterheads" for the different datelines: drawings of Bristol Hotwells for Bristol, and Montagu House (home of the Blue-stocking Elizabeth Montagu) for Portman Square. Lesley Castle itself ("A dismal old weather-beaten Castle," one character calls it [20]) is based on Craigievar Castle in Scotland, which is usefully higher than it's wide, so nicely fits the shape of our page. To provide a Scottish flavor to the exterior I supplied a silhouette of a kilted shepherd with bagpipes, sporran, and plaid stockings. Darkness and vivid lightning add a Gothic touch for the cover. I needed some gloomy candle-lit interiors to convey the mock-heroic tone of the piece. Lady Lesley meets her stepdaughters, "two great tall out-of-the-way overgrown Girls" (22) in a chiaroscuro setting with bottom lighting, grotesque carvings, and an empty-faced suit of armor. A mouse in the corner (mice have become something of a signature for me) casts a spookily enlarged shadow.

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For the figures I listened to the text. This is a story of contrasts: of the petite stepmother Lady Lesley with her "Scotch Giants" of stepdaughters, the dignified demeanor of the Lesley daughters with their "fluttering ... dissipated" father, the tragic departure of young Lesley with his cheerful recovery in Paris, the stolid responses of the food-obsessed Charlotte Lutterell with the histrionic behavior of her hysterical sister Eloise. All this provides splendid opportunity for the illustrator. Sometimes--as with the two pictures of young Lesley--one frame contrasts with another. And sometimes--as with Charlotte and Eloise Lutterell--the two opposites can combine in a single illustration. Charlotte (who is fond of culinary metaphors) explains how Eloise, "with her face as White as a Whipt Syllabub," announces the fatal riding accident of her fiance (20). Charlotte perhaps falls a little short in sympathy: "Good God! (said I) you don't say so? Why what in the name of Heaven will become of all the Victuals! We shall never be able to eat it while it is good. However, we'll call in the Surgeon to help us--. I shall be able to manage the Sir-loin myself; my Mother will eat the Soup, and You and the Doctor must finish the rest." (8-9)

Eloise is not so stoic: "She continued for some Hours in the most dreadful Convulsions" (9). For my picture I showed Eloise in the convulsions in the foreground, with Charlotte and their mother stolidly eating their way through the wedding food in the background.

One reason I find Jane's juvenilia such a delight to illustrate is that their humor is broad, their tone loud and outrageous, the characters and incidents over the top. My own graphic style is always close to caricature, so I feel I qualify as a teammate for the teenage Jane. I wouldn't dare to illustrate the six novels, because delicacy and nuance aren't my line. (I confess I don't much like the existing illustrations of Brock or Thompson: they seem altogether too pretty and prissy to me. I'd rather see Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth, or Emma Thompson as Elinor.) But my firmly satiric line is better suited to the food-obsessed Charlotte Lutterell of Lesley Castle, or red-faced Alice of Jack & Alice, or greedy Mary Stanhope of The Three Sisters.

Joseph Wiesenfarth's edition of Jack W Alice, for the AGM at Seattle, was the next volume I had the chance to illustrate. (3) This is the very funny tale that my students had first worked on as a class project, and I wanted to do it .justice. Far from the propriety and restraint that largely pertain in the six novels, Jack W Alice offers a boozy family "addicted to the Bottle & the Dice," a "short, fat & disagreeable" villainess who poisons her rival and is eventually "exalted ... to the gallows" (26), and a hero "of so dazzling a Beauty that none but Eagles could look him in the face" (3). Such characters aren't exactly painted with "so fine a Brush, as produces little effect alter much labor" (letter of 16 December 1816); but they're a gift for the caricaturist.

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In the beautiful Charles Adams young Jane plays wickedly with gender roles by loading him with the characteristics we normally expect in a heroine. He is "accomplished & bewitching" (3), and instead of being a suitor himself he is actively courted by a string of vigorous and love-hungry women. In a central scene that is a take-off of the masquerade in Fanny Burney's Cecilia, Charles Adams adopts a mask of the sun, and his beams dazzle the spectators. How is the illustrator to visualize such a presence?

It was my inspiration to render the sun god Charles Adams as Apollo; and not just any Apollo, but the Apollo Belvedere, the classical statue in the Vatican that through the nineteenth century was considered the type of male beauty. The statue, besides the cloak draped over the extended left arm, is nude. Tsk, tsk, frontal nudity in Jane Austen?--even in Jane's juvenilia? I don't think so. In decorous times the statue was given a fig leaf, and I extended that into a brief but elegant kilt. And to show the dazzling effect of Apollo-Charles's beams, I added another masquerader shielding her eyes. I was rather pleased with my effect. But I ran afoul of my editor. Joe reasonably pointed out that, though the others are initially dazzled by Charles's beams, when he obligingly half-closes his eyes, "the company discovered him to be Charles Adams in his plain green Coat, without any mask at all" (5). I had gone for the grand illusion; the editor was a stickler for reality. But rather than sacrifice my Apollo-Charles, I added a second picture of him in the same pose, but now clothed, with a mirror in his extended hand in which to admire himself. My compromise was to provide illusion and reality.

Frederic & Elfrida, edited by Peter Sabor and his students, comes very early in Volume the First, and very early in Austen's writing career too. She was probably only twelve when she wrote it (the same age, I argue, at which she wrote The Beautifull Cassandra. (4)) I read it as a take-off of the elaborate rituals of courtship, as dramatized by Richardson and his followers in the sentimental novel. The characters take their devotion to Propriety and punctilio to absurd lengths. The hero and heroine, we hear, "loved with mutual sincerity but were both determined not to transgress the rules of Propriety by owning their attachment" (1). This decorous reticence, of course, makes for rather slow progress in the courtship. The parents at last intervene to set up an engagement, and things appear to be on the move: "the wedding cloathes were bought & nothing remained to be settled but the naming of the Day" (8). This last condition turns out to be a major impediment. The decision about timing is always left to the bride-to-be; but since she is not allowed to show an iota of eagerness in the matter, Elfrida can't bring herself to do anything so improper as choosing a date for the wedding. Time passes: "Weeks & fortnights flew away ...; the Cloathes grew out of fashion" (17), and suddenly it's eighteen years later, and Frederic starts taking a fancy to a girl who wasn't yet born when he got engaged.

It was this delayed time scheme that gave me my clue for my pictures. While Jane was mocking an over-refined propriety, I wanted to show the cost in years of happiness lost. (I could elaborate here on a parallel with the interrupted romance in Persuasion: "Eighteen years and a half is a period indeed!," Captain Wentworth might have said. But I'll admit such a parallel would be far-fetched.) I decided to let the clothes work for me in telling the story. Assuming the end of the story is around 1788, when Jane was writing, the beginning must have been back around 1770, when fashions were very different from the Regency lines we associate with Austen's novels. I put my young people into mid-eighteenth-century fig, with wigs or piled-up hairdos, and broad shelves on the hips of the ladies. And I showed the wedding outfits on dummies, so that I could show them again later, much deteriorated. I took Miss Havisham for my inspiration, and added not only tatters to the wedding garments, but cobwebs, too, and yes, a mouse.

If Elfrida is the girl who can't say Yes, Charlotte is the girl who can't say No. In the course of the same morning, she receives proposals from "an aged gentleman with a sallow face" and "a young & Handsome Gentleman with a new blue coat" (11, 13), and accepts them both. I enjoyed the chance of parallel pictures of the hideous old lecher and the handsome hunk. It's "Hyperion to a satyr," as Hamlet says. Mysteriously, "there was something in the appearance of the second Stranger, that influenced Charlotte in his favor to the full as much as the appearance of the first. She could not account for it, but so it was" (13). This is Austen's take-off on the familiar eighteenth-century maxim that women should be loftily unaffected by "person" in their choice of a husband. Considering this is a slender tale of a mere 2300 words, it's remarkable how much consistent and incisive satire young Jane manages to pack in.

My most recent set of illustrations has been for Joe Wiesenfarth's new edition of The Three Sisters. In many ways this epistolary tale reads like an urversion of Pride and Prejudice. There's a mother keen to marry off her daughters to a rich suitor, a suitor who boasts "it is equally the same to me which I marry of three" (15), and a girl who can't wait to take precedence of her sisters by marrying first. Sound familiar? This was written some years later than Frederic & Elfrida, and there are some audibly serious moral moments. In the midst of Mary Stanhope's bargaining for every penny of pin money and every expensive equipage available, Sophy, the middle sister, presents a moral norm:

"I expect my Husband to be good tempered & Chearful: to consult my Happiness in all his Actions, & to love me with Constancy & Sincerity."

Mr. Watts stared. (12)

The exchange--the serious moral sentiment that is received with incredulous dismissal--has the same mix of satire and morality that we find in Pope's The Rape of the Lock, when the sensible Clarissa delivers the moral message about retaining good humor: "So spoke the Dame, but no Applause ensu'd."

What about illustratable action and character?--I had to ask myself. At the literal level The Three Sisters is far from providing the adventurous action we find in The Beautifull Cassandra, or the picturesque scenery of Lesley Castle, or the vivid masquerade of Jack & Alice. There are conversations, letters, an invitation to tea, a visit. Not very visually suggestive. But the things and events the characters imagine are vivid indeed: a duel where Mary's putative brother punishes Mr. Watts, a ball where she chaperones her grateful little sisters, a theater where she plays Lady Bell Bloomer in Which is the Man?, and a string of horses, carriages, footmen and lady's-maids that she covets. So as with Charles Adams as Apollo, I decided to include the fantasy life of the characters in my pictures, alongside their literal actions. I borrowed a device from comic books, the "thinks" balloon, to differentiate imagined from actual action and property. I also distinguished the female fantasy from the male: So Mary imagines her elegant blue-and-silver coach (I borrowed the design from Felton's Carriages) in the usual cloudy balloon, while Mr. Watts imagines taking his pick from three mannequin-like sisters in a manly squared-off fantasy.

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The letters from the sisters are all from the same address, so there was no point in designing letterheads for the different datelines. But to draw attention to the epistolary format I did throw in portraits of the two letter-writing sisters, greedy Mary and the ironic trickster Georgiana, in the act of penning their letters. And because Georgiana seems the most ironic and self-aware character (not goody-goody like Sophy or grossly self-seeking like Mary) I gave her an ironic smile and curls on her forehead like Jane's.

A particular aspect of the eighteenth-century novel that Jane burlesqued turned out to be especially useful to the illustrator: the deeply-imbibed doctrine that emotion eventuates in legible gestures of the limbs or facial features. (5) Acting manuals for" the stage, and instructions from academies to painters, regularly taught that there are specific motions or "actions" for specific passions, and novelists eagerly picked up on the doctrine. Likewise, young Jane eagerly picked up on the novelists' convention. In The Beautifull Cassandra, for instance, when Cassandra meets Maria, "They trembled, blushed, turned pale & passed each other in a mutual silence." We are given no clue to what would cause this emotional manifestation: the manifestation itself seems to be the point. So my Maria (a squirrel with a fashionable parasol) provides a lull theatrical performance of astonishment and shock--she steps back, turns aside, and clutches her heart. Cassandra drops her eyes and looks demure. This little charade successfully performed, they pass each other serenely, each going unperturbed about her business. To perform such actions well was proof of a kind of somatic sincerity that was deemed highly admirable. Margaret Lesley of Lesley Castle actually falls in love with a certain gentleman's "polished Manners and Delightful Bow" (LC S6). For the illustrator, as for eighteenth-century artists, this recognized expressive code is very useful; I too, want my characters to be fully and vividly expressive. Young Jane was already alert to the merely conventional aspects of the code. In The Three Sisters there's a moment when the two younger sisters want to fake surprise at something they already know all about. When Mary announces that Mr. Watts has proposed, her sister records, "We were of course very much surprised" (11). Here was my chance to overstate gesture: the younger sisters humorously overact their surprise, with raised hands and widened eyes, as in the manuals for actors and painters. I take full advantage of Austen's tongue-in-cheek descriptions of these theatrical gestures, because they give me a chance to indulge in overstatement, too.

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Working with the juvenilia does indeed give you a special intimacy and a particular angle on Jane Austen as a writer, as those students have found who participated in the editing of these slim volumes. We don't look in the juvenilia for fine moral discriminations or fully realized characters such as we admire in the six novels. But then we don't go to the novels for rambunctious energy and free-fall laughter and brilliant nonsense. What's already there, though, is the wit and intelligence and especially the wonderful control of language.

As for characters and situations--they come so thick and last in the juvenilia that they're hard to keep track of, and many readers give up the effort. But as an illustrator I've made it my business to get to know these wild and uninhibited personalities with their gargantuan appetites and manic energy. I agree with Jack Grey, who once shared with me his conviction that there have been two artists who have created world-class works before adulthood: Mozart and Jane Austen.

NOTES

(1.) With Christine Alexander I have co-edited a collection, currently in press with Cambridge University Press, called The Child Writer from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. It includes essays on Jane Austen by Margaret Anne Doody and Rachel Brownstein, as well as others on the Brontes, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and others.

(2.) Charlotte Bronte's letter to G. H. Lewes of 12 January 1848 (Southam 126).

(3.) I have published brief papers on illustrating Jack & Alice and Frederic & Elfrida in Sensibilities (nos. 22 and 26, June 2003 and June 2004), and I have drawn here on some of that material.

(4.) See my Afterword to The Beautifull Cassandra.

(5.) I have explored these codes in my recent book, Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.

WORKS CITED

ALEXANDER, CHRISTINE, AND JULIET McMASTER, EDS. The Child Writer from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge UP (in press).

AUSTEN, JANE. The Beautifull Cassandra, edited and illustrated by Juliet McMaster. Victoria: Sono Nis Press, 1993.

--. Frederic & Elfrida, ed. Peter Sabot, et al. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 2002.

--. Jack & Alice, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth, et al. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 2000.

--. Lesley Castle. Ed. Jan Fergus, et al. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 1998.

--. Mansfield Park. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1953.

--. The Three Sisters, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth, et al. Sydney: Juvenilia Press, 2004.

GREY, J. DAVID, ED. Jane Austen's Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989.

McMASTER, JULIET. Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

SOUTHAM, B. C., ED. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.

Juliet McMaster, Professor of English at the University of Alberta, is the author of Jane Austen on Love and Jane Austen the Novelist, as well as co-editor of Jane Austen's Business and The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. She founded Juvenilia Press.