Posts Tagged ‘Emma’
“I always said I’m a teacher who writes or an editor who writes”*…
Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison was indeed a teacher (a professor at Princeton from 1989 until 2006). Before that, she was an editor (at Random House, working with authors including Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara and Muhammad Ali), where, as Melina Moe explains, Morrison’s critical skills and generosity were already evident– as much in her rejection letters as in the works she shepherded through the press…
“I found it extremely honest, forthright, and moving in ways I had not expected it to be,” Toni Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist in 1977, “but it is a shuddering book and one that offers no escape for any reader whatsoever.” Still, Morrison, then a senior editor at Random House, liked the manuscript so much that, before responding, she passed it around the office to drum up support. The verdict was “intelligent,” but also “very ‘down,’ depressing, spiritually abrasive.” Whatever the merits of the writing, Morrison’s colleagues predicted, the potent mix of dissatisfaction, anger, and mournfulness would limit the book’s commercial appeal—and Morrison reluctantly agreed. “You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape,” her letter concludes, “but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.”
During her 16 years at Random House, Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters. Usually typed on pink, yellow, or white carbonless copy paper, and occasionally bearing Random House’s old logo and letterhead, these are now filed among her correspondence in the Random House archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. While many of the letters were mailed to New York, Boston, and even Rome, others were sent to writers in more obscure places; some are addressed to “general delivery” in various small towns across the United States.
Regardless of destination, Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism. The letters themselves—generally one, two at most, exchanged with a given writer—constitute an asymmetrical archive. On one end of each communiqué is the ghost of a submitted manuscript (absent from the archive after being returned to the sender, although in some cases survived by a cover letter). On the other is a rejection from Morrison, sometimes brusque yet typically offering something more than an expression of disinterest—notes on craft, character development, the need for more (or less) drama. But also: Autopsies of a changing, and in many ways diminishing, publishing industry; frustrations with the tastes of a reading public; and sympathies for poets, short story writers, and other authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres…
A fascinating (and instructive) read that leaves one feeling even more warmly about Morrison: “There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters,” from @LAReviewofBooks.
(Image above: source)
* Toni Morrison
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As we open the envelope, we might note that today mark’s the anniversary of another epistolary event of literary note: on this date in 1816, Jane Austen sent a momentous missive…
Towards the end of 1815, Jane came into contact with Rev. James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent’s Librarian. The Prince, it appeared, was an avid reader of novels and was a particular fan of Jane Austen’s works – keeping a set at each of his residences.
Stanier Clarke invited Jane to visit the Prince’s lavish library at Carlton House, and during the visit he suggested that, as the Prince admired her work, she would be ‘at liberty to dedicate any future novel to him’.
Jane did not like or approve of the Prince (or the ‘P.R.’ as she charmingly dubs him in her letters), who was famously debauched and profligate. Nevertheless, she complied with the royal request, dedicating Emma to the Prince…
Her correspondence with Stanier Clarke continued into the spring of 1816, when this letter was written. In it, Jane responds to Stanier Clarke’s suggestion that for her next work she might attempt a ‘Historical Romance illustrative of the History of the august house of Cobourg’.
She tactfully declines the idea, writing that although such a work might be more profitable or popular than her ‘pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages’, she ‘could no more write a Romance than an Epic Poem’…
“LETTER FROM JANE AUSTEN TO JAMES STANIER CLARKE, 1 APRIL 1816” Jane Auten House (facsimile at this link)
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid”*…
Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts…
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
As the anniversary of her death approaches, Jane Austen and her work will be celebrated across the UK and the world. Lucy Worsley explores why such a well-loved author remains so mysterious.
“Downright nonsense” was the verdict of Mrs Augusta Bramston, a Hampshire friend and neighbour of the Austen family, on reading Pride and Prejudice. In 1814, Jane Austen published Mansfield Park, a sophisticated study of love and family life. Mrs Bramston nevertheless thought she ought to give it go, and having struggled through volume one, “flattered herself she had got through the worst”.
Jane Austen recorded this and other hilarious remarks from friends in a list of opinions on Mansfield Park. The document, in Austen’s own neat handwriting, is just one of the funny and sad items in the British Library’s new exhibition, Jane Austen Among Family and Friends [which opened yesterday].
Austen surely recorded the comments in a spirit of malicious mockery rather than regret. Even if only a small number of readers appreciated her at the time of her death in 1817, she hopefully knew just how brilliant a writer she was. Two hundred years later, everyone knows it. Her face is to appear on £10 notes and £2 coins, and the bicentenary of her death will see a slew of exhibitions showcasing her writing and world…
More on “The Divine Jane” at “Jane Austen at 200: still a friend and a stranger.”
* Jane Austen
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As we muse on manners, we might send nostalgic birthday greetings to A.A. Milne; he was born on this date in 1882. Milne spent the earliest years of his career as a playwright, screenwriter, and the author of a single mystery novel, but is remembered for the two volumes of Winnie-the-Pooh stories he wrote for (and featuring) his son, Christopher Robin. His transitional work, written immediately after the birth of his son, was a book of children’s verse, When We Were Young, famously ornamented by Punch illustrator E. H. Shepard.
Oh. My. God!…
This pretty little dress was most likely made for the ’72 television version of Emma. It was used again several years later on Mrs.Hurst in Pride and Prejudice. It is seen on in the background on an extra at a ball in Mansfield Park a few years later. Most recently it was seen in the mini-series John Adams in the episode “Unnecessary War.”
359 (so far) other illustrated examples at Recycled Movie Costumes.
As we look discretely over our shoulders, we might recall that Ralph Rueben Lifshitz was born in New York City on this date in 1939. Better known by his designer name, Ralph Lauren, he remade American wardrobes with lines like Chaps and Polo– and in the process, conjured a broad nostalgia for a “past” that he created, as it were, from whole cloth.
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