And About Barton Cottage…

A small green court was the whole of its demesne in front; and a neat wicket gate admitted them into it.

As a house, Barton Cottage, though small, was comfortable and compact; but as a cottage it was defective, for the building was regular, the roof was tiled, the window shutters were not painted green, nor were the walls covered with honeysuckles.  A narrow passage led directly through the house into the garden behind.  On each side of the entrance was a sitting room, about sixteen feet square; and behind them were the offices and the stairs.  Four bedrooms and two garrets formed the rest of the house.  It had not been built many years and was in good repair.  In comparison of Norland, it was poor and small indeed! — but the tears which recollection called forth as they entered the house were soon dried away. They were cheered by the joy of the servants on their arrival, and each for the sake of the others resolved to appear happy.  It was very early in September; the season was fine, and from first seeing the place under the advantage of good weather, they received an impression in its favour which was of material service in recommending it to their lasting approbation.

Sense And Sensibility – Chapter Six

Who wouldn’t want to live in Barton Cottage?  As a fervid Janeite I want to understand the dismay with which Elinor, her sisters and her mother feel on moving into their small (for them) new abode - but I confess that I can’t.

I would relish the process of returning home by entering a small green courtyard through a neat wicket gate. A tiled roof, shuttered windows, cozy sitting rooms and a passage leading into a garden behind the cottage with high hills behind and lofty green downs nearby to walk and dream upon….  It all sounds blissful. Now these ladies were in a serious downsizing situation and it is true that none of us want to leave a beloved home – yet I find myself envying this set of Dashwoods.

But what’s this about the cottage being defective because the shutters weren’t green? And not only were the outside walls sadly honeysuckle-free, but the building was regular and the roof was only… well… tiled?    From William Wordsworth’s descriptions of moss-grown huts and Keats’ autumn cottages whose thatched eves were covered with fruited vines, it’s easy to see that Romanticism had leant a yearning for the rustic, the picturesque and the irregular.

Jane Austen wrote during the time of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron, and many of this Regency work’s characters and their reactions strongly echo the period’s Sensibility Movement.  The Regency Era (1811-1820) fell directly in the middle of what is considered The Romantic Period (1800-1840) and its literature reflected the thoughts and emotions of the time.  This reading of Sense And Sensibility has awakened me to a fresh realization of how much the Romantic Movement is reflected in Marianne Dashwood with her love of beauty, her pride in unbridled emotions and her admiration of passionate hearts.  

"It was impossible for her to say what she did not feel, however trivial the occasion; and upon Elinor therefore the whole task of telling lies when politeness required it, always fell."

Sense And Sensibility – Chapter 21

Next weekend we will meet to discuss Jane Austen’s first published work – Sense And Sensibility - over perfectly brewed tea, fruit, pastries and savories.  

Read on!

 "Meeting you was fate, becoming your friend was a choice, but falling in love with you I had no control over."

William Cowper

Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen

“Always resignation and acceptance. Always prudence and honour and duty. Elinor, where is your heart?”

      Sense And Sensibility

In 1811 Thomas Egerton of the publishing house Military Library (Whitehall, London) published a novel by “A Lady”.  The young nineteen year old author paid for its publication – the cost of which was roughly one third of her annual household income - and then paid the publisher a commission on sales. Entitled Sense And Sensibility, it was her first published work.

This young writer was to have four major novels published during her lifetime and two posthumously.  Sadly, it was only after her death that she was identified by name as author of her works.

Born a country clergyman’s daughter on December 16, 1775 at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire, Jane Austen was educated at home, drawing from her father’s extensive library and the educational atmosphere created with Mr. Austen’s live-in pupils.  Even as a child, Jane entertained her family with poems, stories and plays.  And she has continued charming countless readers ever since.

Sense And Sensibility was originally written sometime around 1795 in the epistolary style and was called Elinor And Marianne. Jane Austen then worked on and completed another novel, First Impressions that her father sought to have published but which was met with a rejection letter.  Returning to Elinor And Marianne, she changed the form to third person narrative and after much revision the work became Sense And Sensibility. There is not enough information to know for sure how much of the original work was retained but we do know that a depth of philosophical thought was added.

Set in the Southwest England of the 1790s Sense And Sensibility explores the necessity of finding a workable mid-ground between passion and reason.  Over the years biographers have questioned what Ms. Austen herself believed in regards to this question…  Should sensibility triumph in the end? And what of passionate love and romantic hope?

Filled with satire, humor and sharp social commentary, Sense And Sensibility carries us into the heart of a family and the devoted love and friendship between two sisters – a fertile ground that Jane Austen thoroughly understood herself.

Our next High Tea and Book Discussion will take place on Saturday the 19th of January 2013.  After happily exploring British Victorian Authors from 2010 through 2012, we are now returning to revisit Jane Austen and her six major works in the order in which they were published.

Our first selection will be Sense And Sensibility and there is plenty of time to walk the lovely path that this book offers.  Don’t pass this masterpiece by and miss the experience!

Current Read - Sherlock Holmes

'Come, Watson, come!' he cried. 'The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!'

Sherlock Holmes Quote from The Adventure of The Abbey Grange

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1859, Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle fought his way through a childhood filled with the instability that his alcoholic father brought to the family and, supported by wealthy uncles, was given the opportunity to receive an education that then enabled him to begin his medical school studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1876.

And it was during that time that Arthur Conan Doyle began to write. 

His experience, talents and medical studies contributed to his creations but although he began to submit short stories to magazines, nothing gained him any significant recognition until A Study In Scarlet was accepted by Ward Lock & Co on November 20, 1886.  It then appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual to good reviews and brought Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson into the literary world and permanently into reader’s hearts for generations to come.

There are thought to be several inspirations for the inimitable detective Sherlock Holmes, but Joseph Bell, one of Conan Doyle’s university professors, is generally recognized as having introduced ideas regarding deduction, observation and inference that found their way into Sherlock’s personality and methods of detection.

After A Study In Scarlet, The Sign Of The Four was commissioned, followed by other successful and popular short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.  With a writing career that continued to be far more successful than his medical career, Conan Doyle began to dedicate himself to also writing historical novels which he considered to be more “important works”.  To clear the path for his new passion, he decided to send Holmes and his nemesis, Moriarty, to their deaths in the story “The Final Problem”. 

Bad idea.

Needless to say, public outcry brought Sherlock Holmes back in more stories – 56 short stories altogether and four novels produced between 1887 and 1927.  Dr. Watson narrates all but four stories but Holmes tells the story himself in “The Blanched Soldier” and “The Lion’s Mane”. The stories  “The Musgrave Ritual” and “The Gloria Scott” feature Holmes relating the storyline to Watson through his memories as the Doctor narrates between. Both “The Mazarin Stone” and His Last Bow are related in third person and A Study In Scarlet and The Valley Of Fear include additional narration both of events known and unknown to either Sherlock and Watson.

The personality of Sherlock Holmes has intrigued and inspired readers ever since their publication and have influenced other works of  fiction, film and television shows.   In London the famous address of 221B Baker Street is as important to lovers of literature as 10 Downing Street is to polititians and Sherlockian fans can even visit the Sherlock Holmes Museum at the well known location. http://www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk/

Members of The Jane Austen Tea Society – you still have plenty of time to read one of the Sherlock Holmes novels or short stories so that we can meet and discuss over tea & scones on Saturday, October 6th.  You may do as I am doing and read “A Study In Scarlet” so that you can discover how Holmes met Dr. Watson.  But you might choose “A Scandal In Bohemia” if you want to read about Sherlock’s love interest or “The Final Problem” to as he crosses paths with Professor Moriarty.

Lay aside your preconceived notions about Sherlock and Watson and go back to the source – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original works!  After all, as Holmes said in “A Study In Scarlet” – 
“There is nothing like first-hand evidence.”

"To see my soul!" muttered Dorian Gray...

... "Your name was implicated in the most terrible confession I ever read.  I told him that it was absurd - that I knew you thoroughly, and that you were incapable of anything of the kind. Know you? I wonder do I know you? Before I could answer that, I should have to see your soul."

"To see my soul!" muttered Dorian Gray, starting up from the sofa and turning almost white from fear.

"Yes," answered Hallward, gravely, and with deep-toned sorrow in his voice -"to see your soul. But only God can do that."

A bitter laugh of mockery broke from the lips of the younger man.

"You shall see it yourself, to-night!" he cried, seizing a lamp from the table. "Come: it is your own handiwork. Why shouldn't you look at it? You can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you choose. Nobody would believe you. If they did believe you, they would like me all the better for it. I know the age better than you do, though you will prate about it so tediously. Come, I tell you.  You have chattered enough about corruption.  Now you shall look on it face to face."

Chapter XII
The Picture Of Dorian Gray

Our Book Tea for The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde will take place this coming Saturday, July 14th at 1pm at our favorite Tearoom over high tea delicacies, steaming, seductively fragrant china cups of Cream Earl Grey and shared & savored analysis.  

You may be with us in person or you may leave us comments here at our blog.  In either case, you hopefully enjoyed this Victorian classic by the singular and quite indomitable Oscar Wilde.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

 “I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland on October 16th, 1854 and died impoverished in Paris on November 30th, 1900.

"I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china."

He was often ridiculously flamboyant and a brilliant conversationalist.  Celebrated and praised by glittering London society and the fashionable elite, he energetically expressed his own daring, personal style through long hair, colorful clothes and a habit of carrying little bouquets when lecturing.

"The only thing worse in the world than being talked about is not being talked about."

Mostly known as a playwright in the early 1890s, Wilde also exercised his writing talents & wit into works of poetry, epigrams, essays, dialogues and his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?”

First appearing in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in the summer of 1890, The Picture Of Dorian Gray was the only published novel by Oscar Wilde. From the magazine version, Wilde amended and revised the story into the novel that was then published in April of 1891 by Ward, Lock And Company. The craving to stay young and beautiful is certainly not foreign to our present age… but what lengths will you go to preserve it. Leading a double life is a dangerous and tricky path to walk.

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”

Fame, a fourteen-year marriage to the wealthy Constance Lloyd and various law suits, combined with unprincipled friends and a growing double life of his own to send Wilde into a decline that finally carried him into a prison sentence at Pentonville and then Wandsworth Prison in London. 

His health ruined, Oscar Wilde went into exile in Paris and spent his last days there in a dismal room -  about which he quipped – “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death.  One of us has got to go.”   Originally a pension house called Hôtel d’Alsace, this renovated Left Bank luxury hotel now offers a stay in various rooms famous for their former occupants – including The Oscar Wilde Room.

http://www.luxurytravelbible.com/Product.asp?ProductName=Oscar%20Wilde%20Room,%20L'Hotel,%20Paris%20&ProductCode=&ProductID=114&CategoryID=15

"Never trust a woman who tells you her real age; a woman who tells you that would tell you anything."

Buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, Oscar Wilde’s monument was kissed so many times with red-lipsticked smooches that to prevent further damage, it has been encased in glass.  It remains a favorite grave in the famed Paris cemetery.

The next read for The Jane Austen Tea Society will be – The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.  Find a copy to start reading now!  Our book tea to discuss this enjoyably discussable read will be July 14^th, 2012!

Book Tea & Discussion - Dracula by Bram Stoker

My companion followed me quickly, and cautiously drew the door to, after carefully ascertaining that the lock was a falling, and not a spring, one. In the latter case we should have been in a bad plight. Then he fumbled in his bag, and taking out a match-box and a piece of candle, proceeded to make a light. The tomb in the day-time, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough; but now, some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured stone, and dust encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron and tarnished brass, and clouded silver plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life – animal life – was not the only thing which could pass away.

Dr. Seward’s Diary – Chapter 15

High Tea & Book Discussion this Saturday next - April 21st - at 1pm at our favorite Tearoom. If you are not finished with the highly imaginative Victorian classic, then keep the pages turning.

Conversations... Dracula & Jonathan Harker

I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling water which please the young and gay. I am no longer young. And my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may.”

Count Dracula - From Jonathan Harker’s Journal­

From Dracula by Bram Stoker - Chapter 2