Orange to withdraw sponsorship of women's prize for fiction
22.05.2012, 09:06:53
Mobile services company will not be renewing its sponsorship of the book awards that have borne its name for 17 years In one of the biggest upsets in literary prize history, the mobile services company Orange has announced this morning that it will not be renewing its sponsorship of the prize for women's fiction that has borne its name since the award's inception 17 years ago. The prize, which was set up to "celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from around the world", is given annually to the best book by a woman written in English. Winners, who in the past have included Marilynne Robinson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith, are presented with a cheque for £30,000 and a bronze figurine known as "the Bessie". The prize money itself is supplied through the endowment of a private donor, but the remainder of the award's expenses have been met by Orange's sponsorship since the prize was launched in January 1996. After this year's award is presented on 30 May, Orange - which joined with mobile company T-Mobile to form the UK's largest communications company, Everything Everywhere , in 2010 - will withdraw its support of the prize in order to focus on film industry sponsorship. Speaking to the industry magazine the Bookseller , Steven Day, chief of brand and communications for Everything Everywhere, said: "While relinquishing sponsorship of the prize is tinged with sadness, we're hugely proud of what Orange and the women's prize for fiction have achieved over the past 17 years. The partnership has significantly raised the presence of international literature written by women in bookstores and on bookshelves across the country, and has played a key part in Orange's success over the past decade and a half, taking our brand into areas that were traditionally harder to reach." Despite the termination of what is at this point the longest continuous arts sponsorship in the UK, Kate Mosse, the award's co-founder and honorary director, was upbeat about the prize's future. Speaking to the Guardian, she praised Orange's sponsorship of the prize, but said that while she was "very sad" not to be working with them anymore, "we're excited at the idea of taking the prize on for another 17 years, and working with a new sponsor to grow it. It's very rare for a sponsorship like this to come onto the market - the investment generates something in the region of £17.5m a year in advertising, and the cultural capital of the women's prise for fiction is practically second to none. The potential is very exciting." Although there was not yet a firm agreement with another sponsor in place, Mosse said, the prize was in talks with several interested parties. "We're in the very early days," she said. "Over the last few days we've started to have informal conversations with companies, and as a result of going on the Today programme this morning to announce the end of Orange's sponsorship, we've had more calls. Of course, I'll be a happy women when we've signed on the dotted line, but I feel pretty confident that this time next year it'll be a bigger and better prize just with a different name over the door. Sponsorship is a marriage between the company and the prize, and it's about finding the perfect match." The six titles on this year's Orange prize shortlist are Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, The Forgotten Waltz by Booker winner Anne Enright, Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick, and State of Wonder by former winner Ann Patchett. Chair of judges Joanna Trollope, said emphatically that the change would have "no impact" on this year's prize, and was optimistic about the award's future under different sponsorship. "Because it's been orange from the beginning, of course it's very embedded in people's minds," she said, "and Orange have been terrific sponsors. But there can be something very liberating about a change. The prize is in such a strong position that it's a sponsorship peach; I imagine there'll be a lot of competition to pick up the baton." Orange prize for fiction Fiction Awards and prizes Sarah Crown guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
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The merry month of May
21.05.2012, 09:31:23
Quiz: With the promise of sun on the way, test your knowledge of literature's hymns to the month's traditional pleasures |
Guardian first book award 2012: hunt for the 10th title
In Diplomatic Circles by Chris Tucker. I have rarely smiled so much all year |
Poem of the week: City Boy by Peter Daniels
22.05.2012, 15:23:00
A young financier taking a drunken tumble might have been an easy target, but this gentle poem has no interest in blame games This week's poem, City Boy, is by Peter Daniels and appears in his recently published first collection, Counting Eggs ( Mulfran Press , 2012). Daniels' poems are good at noticing the unfamiliar, or highlighting the familiar from an unexpected angle. Here, the faintly spivvy young financier, "comfortable and sharp in a suit that fits him," might have been an easy target, the tumble he takes as he "steers" homewards after closing time a cause of vengeful glee should the poet have chosen to play the anarchist or the virtuous taxpayer. But the poem has no interest in blame games. Any irony belongs primarily to the term "city boy" itself. Both the character and what he represents in a contemporary or recent London context are treated gently. The tone is occasionally amused but never judgmental. The poem's first line suggests its speaker might have been predisposed to kindliness: "In a moment of love I caught a sense of money ..." That "moment of love" could be coincidental, part of another story altogether. However, the overall mood suggests otherwise: the love is provoked by the city boy, an imaginative response to his moment of humiliation. Money's human dimension, its connection with our more vulnerable selves, is the thought associated with this "love", and it winds persistently through the poem. Meanwhile, the sentence continues, first rather gingerly holding money at a distance ("how they make it") and then bringing it into the sphere of the human with the unexpected "and make it up". This last thought may be the cornerstone of the poem. Money is like a story or a face; it is fluid and constructed - something we create. The narrative shifts to the present tense, and what writing gurus call "the inciting incident": the young man's fall. Interestingly, the important event is left until the end of the second sentence in line six: we're told that "an evening of gin is a good anaesthetic" before we're told he "smacks the concrete". The gritty consonants of the verb and noun register the painful jolt, but then more anaesthetic is applied. "He'll get home" is reassuring. Syntax mirrors psychology. Someone who falls over in public scrambles up quickly and tries to give the impression nothing has happened. The long, free-flowing lines of the poem help this continued effect of smoothing things over. Feminine endings are a recurrent characteristic of its music, and while there's no direct rhyme, faint echoes soften the edges of words like "anaesthetic", "spreadsheets", "credit". Before the city boy gets to his feet in line 16, the poem expands on its gentle phantasmagoria. Money becomes a dream, a property of the subconscious. In a rapid alchemy, the abstract and seeming opposites "work and lust" are transmuted into "metal and paper" - money at its most tactile. Spreadsheets certainly can look like flattened office blocks, and in the poem they build them, nocturnally and in secret - "Even after closing time..." They also build up "credit that creates the pavement to land on", furthering the earlier thought that for the city boy, the concrete and the dream of money are one. Numbers themselves behave like lovers; they "whisper to each other, transact and multiply". "The drunken city" suggests collective amnesia: perhaps others are about, in a condition similar to that of the protagonist, but agreeing not to notice. "The sober city" goes to work as usual the next morning, determined "to keep it happening". Somehow, the two patterns of behaviour are interdependent. Although it avoids the crude cliche of money as religion, the poem uses parallelism here, and skims a biblical lexicon in phrases like "got up and walked" and words like "faith" and "trust". This element of incantation recalls the last stanza of Philip Larkin's Money : "I listen to money singing ... It is intensely sad." A familiar synecdoche operates in terms like "the city" and "money". The particularity of "what we are and where we're tender" makes effective contrast, and insists on private resonance. The word "tender" is nicely ambiguous, and takes us beyond bruised flesh to the emotionally tender spots. Almost casually the poem yokes the negative and positive effects of the money, part of which is love, and the love, of which part is money. There's a new development, or emphasis, in conclusion. The earlier narrative concerned one person's fall and rise. Now we have "buildings and people standing up, or falling down". If the idea of a financial crash has hovered earlier, it seems more sharply evoked here. The image could suggest a cataclysm beyond the economic. We have no choice, however, but to trust the "harness" of exchange mechanisms woven from, and for, ourselves. The voice remains calm and dreamy. City Boy has an argument, but it is didactic rather than polemical, a poem that takes no sides and draws no lines. There's not even a suggestion that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. The denarius, after all, had a human face. City Boy In a moment of love I caught a sense of money and how they make it, and make it up. That city boy, comfortable and sharp in a suit that fits him, steers through the station when the city bars have closed, and an evening of gin is a good anaesthetic when he trips and smacks the concrete. He'll get home, he'll recover in the faith that the concrete is his dream of money: work and lust made into metal and paper, made into numbers that whisper to each other, transact and multiply. Even after closing time, spreadsheets are building up office blocks, and credit that creates the pavement to land on. I saw the drunken city exercise discretion, and the sober city dream of how to keep it happening. I watched the city boy get up and walk. I felt how this money is part of us, and keeps ourselves within it. Some of it has to be love, what we hope and where we're tender. All we have is to trust for it to care for us, curse us and keep us in harness, to work for something in a city made out of buildings and people standing up, or falling down. Poetry Carol Rumens guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
Reviews: Amazon v newspaper
22.05.2012, 11:05:28
Academics have charted reviews on social media sites and broadsheet books desks, and ranked their impact on novel sales. The results make for interesting reading Last week's paper from the Harvard Business School asking "What makes a critic tick?" put me in mind of teachers and bombs. Literary critics can be either, but are they any longer central to the chances of a novelist's success? The Harvard report compared "professional" reviewers (ie those working for newspapers and magazines) with their new competition: the folk who leave reviews on Amazon. Though they limited themselves to Amazon reviewers, they could have cast their net much wider; these days the ivory towers of book reviewing are under attack by a ragtag, undisciplined army of humanity, dispensing their reviews and their ratings across Amazon , Goodreads , LibraryThing , blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the whole glittering panoply of the social web. The conclusion of the Harvard academics was broadly this : that professionals are slightly more likely to review and approve of books written by writers who worked for the same titles as they, or books that had won prizes. Amazon reviewers, on the other hand, were rather more eclectic, and in particular seemed to be more supportive of debut authors. I find the first part of this analysis less surprising than the second part. I think it's almost axiomatic that reviewers for the Guardian will look more favourably on books written by Guardian writers. I don't think that's especially sinister, either. As the paper's authors say, what is actually going on here is a secondhand audience bias: writers who write for the Guardian are more likely to write books that people who read the Guardian will like. Similarly, a book that has won a prize has a badge of assumed quality; someone else has already done the filtering. But this bias also sparks the immemorial cry of the debut author who doesn't know anyone on the books desk: how on earth am I to get noticed? My first book, The English Monster , came out in March. I now know that the thing first-time authors crave above all else - above food, water and love - is attention. And you're more likely to get that from Amazon reviewers than from newspaper critics, for the simple reason that more books are published now than at any other time in history, and there's only so much room for them in the pages (actual and virtual) of the press. Which is not at all to say that a review in a newspaper is worthless. Quite the opposite; it is a particularly rarefied form of attention, and can in itself seed even more coverage on the social web. It is attention - to your book, and to you - that makes the difference. Another recent academic paper, called "Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase Sales" (Berger, Sorensen, Rasmussen) looked at reviews in the New York Times and estimated their impact on hardback fiction titles. What they found was that a negative review had a negative impact on the sales of books by established writers, but that a negative review of a debut title actually increased sales. The reason is pretty obvious: if nobody knows who you are, and the New York Times reviews your book, more people are going to be aware of you, and that's much more important than the content of the review. But if you're Stephen King and the Gray Lady gives you a hiding - well, you can only lose. Being reviewed is a bizarre experience, wherever the review appears. Positive reviews are blissful but strangely transitory, forgotten within hours. Negative reviews are crunchingly terrible things which can haunt sleepless nights. Worst of all are thoughtless reviews: those that reveal the plot, or take quotes out of context and pillory you for them, or compare you with heartless indifference to a great author against whom you would never choose to be measured. One reviewer said my book recalled the work of Peter Ackroyd, only to follow this up with the kicker "Shepherd is no Ackroyd" . Well, of course he isn't, but did you really have to say so? This kind of thing would be perfectly recognisable to any author from the past 200 years. A review is a review, wherever it appears. What would be completely unrecognisable would be the avalanche of feedback which, within days of publication, starts to come through to you from the web. It used to be said that there were two types of author: those who read their reviews, and liars. Now, there are two types of author: those who have a Google alert set up for the title of their book, and those who don't know how to. This feedback can send you a bit mad. It can spark agonies and ecstasies, and the fact that most authors work on their own, often at home, doesn't help matters. One's partner can come home from their proper job and find you pulling wallpaper down because someone you've never met in Albuquerque didn't understand the clever Adam Smith joke you made on page 342. But it brings its own joys too. One Saturday night my search alert on Twitter lit up, and I found a male nurse from Bury raving about my book. I started chatting to him, and he showered me with praise and said he was going tell everyone he knew to read my book. That's the kind of positive review which stays with you. What shall we call this? Crowd criticism? Community reviewing? Mob feedback? Whatever we call it, it seems unruly and uncontrollable - but also a fair bit more accessible to the author than traditional reviews in the book pages. You won't get much mileage complaining to the books editor about the mugging you received in his pages. But you might be able to have a conversation with someone who wrote that they didn't like your book on their blog. It's a strange world we find ourselves in. I recently heard about an author who self-publishes her books on Kindle. She had someone write some code for her which correlated her sales with her reviews. She found that a negative review led to an immediate drop in sales of up to 70%. So now, as soon as her software alerts her to a drop in sales, she contacts a friend and asks them to write a positive review. As soon as this goes live on Amazon, her sales pick up. Such gaming is inevitable. In a world where so many of us like to broadcast what book we're reading, what film we've just seen, what music we're loving - indeed, when the social media we use tells everyone what we're listening to, reading or watching without us ever asking it to - authors will try every trick to get attention for what they do. As one writer who fully understood the value of attention and celebrity once said: there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. o Lloyd Shepherd's novel The English Monster is published by Simon and Schuster. Fiction Amazon.com Internet E-commerce Newspapers & magazines Social media Newspapers Harvard University Higher education Lloyd Shepherd guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
'The Booker can drive people mad'
19.05.2012, 23:05:49
When Alan Hollinghurst's celebrated The Stranger's Child was omitted from the literary prize's shortlist, many questioned the award's credibility. Twelve months on, Britain's great stylist breaks his silence on the issue - and on what turns young people into 'monsters and bores' Alan Hollinghurst lives in a light and preternaturally quiet flat on Parliament Hill in north London. When his novel The Line of Beauty won the Booker prize in 2004, he spent some of his winnings on revamping it, with the result that it has a new, large sitting room with a lush view out on to a corner of Hampstead Heath. Furniture is sparse (he likes to joke that the money ran out before he could stretch to armchairs), but there are pale carpets and good paintings and - what's this? - a strange plaster relief, in an elaborate gilt frame, of the face of a (presumably long dead) young woman. I move towards it excitedly, as if I were the first visitor ever to notice it. Beneath her profile is written her name: Daphne. Crikey. Was this a source of inspiration for Daphne Sawle, one of the most important characters in The Stranger's Child , his fifth and most recent novel? He smiles, indulgently. But, no. He bought it at auction just as he was finishing the book, by which time Daphne Sawle was every bit as real to him as this fine-boned, turn-of-the-century creature. Hollinghurst is all indulgent smiles today, which is just as well because I've got the jitters. The Stranger's Child , a capacious and wonderful book that begins in one suburban garden in 1913 and ends in another in 2008, has many themes. It is about love, and the passing of time; it is, too, about ambition, taste and disappointment. But more than anything, it is about the unknowability of human beings, and the misunderstandings, even the danger, associated with trying to plug the gaps in our perceptions. Its nastiest and perhaps most memorable character is Paul Bryant, an enterprising hack reviewer and the would-be biographer of Cecil Valance, the Rupert Brooke -ish figure whose short life and long but ever-shifting literary reputation crouches at the heart of The Stranger's Child . Bryant, like me, makes a living poking around in people's lives - and I have the impression that his creator disapproves. When he goes to stay with Daphne Sawle, for whom, when she was a girl, Cecil Valance wrote a famous poem, she likens him to a "little wire-haired ratter"; she knows, even before he has lobbed his first question, that all he is interested in, basically, is "smut". When Paul asks her if he might tape their conversation, Hollinghurst writes of the recorder's "odd insinuations of flattery and mistrust". He then lists, highly accurately, the various ways interviewees respond to it: some made awkward, as if it were an eavesdropper; others reassured to a degree that results in a kind of verbal incontinence. I place my own tape recorder down on the small table beside us. I half expect it to explode, like a grenade. So, does he loathe Paul? "Well, I wanted to depict him changing," he says, carefully. "And one knows how sweet young people can turn into monsters and bores." They curdle. "Yes, exactly. They curdle." What about biography? Does he disapprove of it? "No, of course not. I love biography. But as with the novel, there's a great range between the great and the crap. A great biography is like a great novel; it has a deep sense of wisdom about life. I'm quite amused, though, and sometimes frustrated, when someone ends up with the wrong biographer. "I'm potty about Ronald Firbank , and the first person to have access to all his papers was this woman, Miriam Benkovitz. She was in a position to do something wonderful, and she wrote this utterly inane book - and, of course, a minor literary figure is unlikely to have their life written again, so it feels like a waste. The same thing happened with Denton Welch [the writer and painter, who died in 1948]. There was this very slipshod biography by Michael De-la-Noy." The Stranger's Child came out last year (it is published in paperback this week) to almost universal praise; the only criticism anyone seemed to be able to level at it was that it isn't The Line of Beauty . But then... controversy! The novel was left off the Booker shortlist, and thus became the focus for discontent with the prize and its supposedly lowbrow leanings; soon after, the literary agent Andrew Kidd announced that he hoped to establish a new, more serious fiction award (although, so far, nothing has yet happened on this score). How did Hollinghurst feel about this? "I didn't say anything [at the time], and it's hard for me to say anything about it now because it sounds like I'm saying: I should have been on the shortlist." But? "But there were a lot of books that should have been on the shortlist - Teddy [Edward St Aubyn, author of At Last ] and Philip Hensher [ King of the Badgers ] and probably a lot of other books I haven't read, too. One can take a position about the shortlist in almost an objective way. But I also learnt, a long time ago, to be aloof from these things. You realise how arbitrary they are. It's lovely if it works out for you, but it doesn't mean anything, really, except in commercial terms. "The Booker made me a lot of money. I didn't realise that all over the world, people will read a book just because it won the Booker prize." A delicious pause. "Not something I would do myself... But then one goes into some quite other, private region to produce a book." He gives me a knowing look. "I think the Booker can drive people quite mad. That's why it's good to be detached from it." Is he in that private region now? I hope so. "I'm in that rather unfocused phase, which is one of discontent with not writing another book. What I'm missing is sitting at my desk and getting into the large alternative space of a book. I've got quite a few bits and pieces, but I haven't quite had the moment of revelation where I see how they fit together. It's always like this: a blur of different things, and then a story emerges." Does he ever think: I'm not sure I can do this again? "I have an underlying confidence that I won't suffer writer's block or anything. But I never think: oh, this will be a smash hit. I know there are things I can do, but an element of doubt is probably quite important." Is writing painful? For some, it's agony. "Perhaps we tend to overplay the agony side of it. But then, like any pain, when it's over, you can't remember it. So perhaps I'm wrong to say we exaggerate it. What I will say is that there are times when it's just the best thing: the high of things coming to you. You get a peculiar sense of elation, as if nothing else really matters. It's not a sense of smugness. But you're buoyed up. Your mind is wonderfully perceptive. It's a very beautiful feeling." I can measure out my adulthood not in coffee spoons, but in Alan Hollinghurst novels. Partly, this is because he takes such an age to write a book; the anxious wait means that one's circumstances have inevitably changed by the time he delivers. Partly, it's because I read his first novel, The Swimming Pool Library , which came out in 1988, during my first year at university, that exciting time when I felt life was just beginning to get going. I remember vividly both the deep surprise of it - all that sex! - and my complete inability to put it down, for all that I was supposed to be watching children (I was their nanny). This is, I think, something the critics rarely point out. They will tell you that his first four novels compose an unofficial history of gay life in Britain ( The Swimming Pool Library , which fleshed out - quite literally - the gay world before and after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, was followed by The Folding Star , a study of romantic and sexual obsession; The Spell , a comedy of manners whose twin engines are ecstasy and a certain kind of narcissism; and finally, triumphantly, The Line of Beauty , perhaps the best book ever written about the 80s). They will also, inevitably, claim him as the greatest stylist of our age. But do they ever use the word page-turner? No, they most certainly do not. He wasn't always going to be a novelist, though. Poetry was his first love. An only child, he grew up in Stroud, Gloucestershire, where his father was a bank manager (he poured this time into The Stranger's Child : Paul Bryant begins his working life in a bank in a small, country town, where he reads Angus Wilson in his lunch hour, and gets turned on by the angle of his stool at the cash desk). At school - his parents sent him to board at Canford in Dorset - Hollinghurst became fascinated by poetical forms. "We had to do a competition," he says. "The theme was 'the pleasures of life'. I wrote three sonnets." And what were, in his then opinion, the pleasures of life? A low chuckle (Hollinghurst is the drollest, most quietly mischievous man I've ever met - though it's in his eyes and the cast of his mouth and the tone of his voice, rather than in anything he actually says). "I'm not sure I'd actually experienced the pleasures of life, then. So it was a case of.... going for a walk, having a cup of tea, er... a pint of foaming ale! " He laughs. "They were published, with some typos, in the school magazine. Being a poet at school had a certain prestige; it was a source of glamour. And if you could write modernistic poems, which no one could understand, then even more so." Later on, as a young man, he published a volume of poems, Confidential Chats with Boys (1982) - "intensely rare", he once described it, self-mockingly - but then the muse left him, and he started on The Swimming Pool Library instead. He was 33 when it was published. Hollinghurst dates his interest in architecture from school, too - and thus, wary though we must be of conflating life and fiction, we can also trace the big houses in his books to this time. "I placed Corley Court [the Valances' home in The Stranger's Child ] almost exactly where my prep school had been," he says. "I'd never gone back into that world before [Corley Court later becomes a school], and I realised the memories were so abundant, I could easily have written a 500-page novel only about that - not that I'm going to! My prep school, an early Jacobean house, made a deep impression on me. I could draw an accurate plan of every floor, even now - and all the fireplaces, the plasterwork on the ceilings. I just absorbed it all. You're wonderfully open and suggestible as a boy, though one also goes through agonies. The emotions of adolescence are so extreme." After a long period at Oxford - he wrote an MLitt thesis on Firbank, Forster and LP Hartley - he came to London, and began working as a reviewer, eventually joining the Times Literary Supplement as an editor. "It was completely unanticipated," he says. "I'd applied for teaching jobs. I had an interview in Edinburgh, and perhaps I'd still be there if I'd got that." The editor told Hollinghurst, sounding slightly embarrassed, that his salary would be £11,500. "And my father said: that's more than I ever earned, old boy." His parents were reassured by the fact of his working at the TLS - and it pleased him, too, to be able to jump dramatically into a taxi and shout: the Times ! (both papers were in the same place ). He went part-time after The Swimming Pool Library came out, and eventually was able to make a living from writing full-time - which is a good thing because he has a problem combining fiction with the rest of life. Hollinghurst is rather sociable. He has been known to go to parties. But once he's deep into a novel, he has to isolate himself. It's for this reason, too, that he has mostly always lived alone. We talk, before I go, about literary estates. It is a horrible fact that while he was writing The Stranger's Child , in which we see Cecil Valance's reputation wax and wane, different parties claiming him as their own at various times, Hollinghurst's dear friend Mick Imlah , the poet, died of motor neurone disease at the age of 52. Hollinghurst, his literary executor, looked on as people wrote about Imlah, "each of them saying what they thought about him rather as the characters do in the book". His own literary executor is Andrew Motion (the two of them shared a house in Oxford; Hollinghurst is also Motion's executor). "Oh, yes, I've kept everything," he says. "A couple of American libraries have suggested I might like to deposit things with them. But I don't like the idea of people rummaging about in my drafts. It's embarrassing. Why expose oneself to that? And I don't think you should be too concerned with posterity while you are living your life." He will admit, though, to enjoying writing his will, when he finally got round to it ("Andrew was much more organised; he wrote his ages before me"). Specifically, he liked the bequest section. So who, I wonder, will get Daphne, with her marble eyes, and her well-bred nose? He laughs, a low rumble of delight. "Yes, that's something I really should think about. I probably need to add a whole new clause for her." Alan Hollinghurst Fiction Booker prize Rachel Cooke guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
Ten questions on Jane Austen
18.05.2012, 21:45:05
The plot of which Austen novel relies on the weather? Where does Wickham have a tryst with Georgiana Darcy? And which character says 'I hate money'? Accuracy is Austen's genius, and asking specific questions about her work reveals its cleverness Jane Austen's admirer Virginia Woolf said that "of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness". It is a brilliant insight. The apparent modesty of Austen's dramas is only apparent; the minuteness of design is a bravura achievement. But it cannot be shown by some grand scene or speech. Accuracy is her genius. Noticing minutiae will lead you to the wonderful interconnectedness of her novels, where a small detail of wording or motivation in one place will flare with the recollection of something that happened much earlier. This is one of the reasons they bear such rereading. Every quirk you notice leads you to a design. If you ask very specific questions about what goes on in her novels, you reveal their cleverness. The closer you look, the more you see. Try these 10 questions. Who marries a man younger than herself? Age matters very much to characters in Austen's novels: think of Elizabeth Elliot in Persuasion , unmarried at 29 and approaching "the years of danger". The age of a young woman (but also a man) determines her (or his) marriage prospects. In Pride and Prejudice , Charlotte Lucas is 27 when she snares Mr Collins, her age spurring her to waste no time when he heaves into view. "A woman of seven and twenty ... can never hope to feel or inspire affection again," declares Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility . She is, however, an absurd 17-year-old: judgments of what is inevitable at any given age are invariably ridiculous failures of imagination. Lady Russell in Persuasion thinks that Charles Musgrove would not have been good enough for Anne Elliot when she was 19, but once she is 22 and still unmarried, he becomes quite a catch, so quickly does a young woman's bloom fade. Yet Lady Russell is usually wrong about things, and at the ripe age of 27 (that number again) Anne gets the man she loves. Charlotte Lucas feels all that age pressure. In hooking her husband she becomes the only woman in all Austen's fiction to marry a man younger than herself. For Mr Collins is introduced to us as a "tall, heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty". Many admirers of Pride and Prejudice think of Mr Collins as middle-aged. In the 1940 Hollywood film the role was taken by British character actor Melville Cooper, then aged 44. The trend was set. In Andrew Davies's 1995 BBC adaptation Mr Collins was played by David Bamber , then in his mid-40s. In the 2005 film, the role was taken by a slightly more youthful Tom Hollander , then aged 38. Adaptors miss the point by getting his age wrong. His solemnity and sententiousness are much better, much funnier, coming from someone so "young". Middle-aged is what he would like to sound, rather than what he is. His youth emphasises Charlotte's achievement, with little money and no beauty to assist her. Who says: 'I hate money'? It has to be a bad person, for anyone who professes not to care about cash must be lying. It is Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey , a youthful but accomplished hypocrite, who announces her antipathy to lucre. A few chapters later she tells Catherine Moreland, in preparation for dumping James Moreland in favour of Frederick Tilney, "after all that romancers may say, there is no doing without money". In Sense and Sensibility , another mercenary young woman, Lucy Steele, talking of Edward Ferrars, tells Elinor Dashwood: "I have always been used to a very small income, and could struggle with any poverty for him." It is the purest cant. Lucy is ruthless about money, a fact nicely illustrated by her stealing all her sister's petty cash from her before eloping with Robert Ferrars. We should not forget that idealistic Marianne Dashwood shares this supposed scorn of wealth with these two calculating girls. When Elinor and Marianne debate the importance of money in the company of Edward, Marianne reacts indignantly to Elinor's declaration that happiness has much to do with "wealth": "'Elinor, for shame!' said Marianne, 'money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction, as far as mere self is concerned.'" When Marianne is burbling about the "remarkably pretty" upstairs sitting room at Allenham (just right, she is thinking, for a lucky wife), she regrets its "forlorn" furniture. All it needs is to be "newly fitted up - a couple of hundred pounds, Willoughby says, would make it one of the pleasantest summer-rooms in England". The casual extravagance of this - all the worse as it is the imagining of wealth that will come only when Willoughby's aunt dies - should stop us short. The two lovers have been thinking of spending twice Miss and Mrs Bates's joint annual income in Emma on soft furnishings for one room. Austen's attentive first readers would surely have come close to despising Marianne when they heard her saying this. It is further proof that those who declare themselves above caring about money are those who are most governed by it. What is Mrs Bennet's Christian name? We never know. Nor do we know the forenames of other Austen ladies: Mrs Dashwood, Mrs Allen, Mrs Norris, Mrs Grant, Mrs Dixon, Mrs Smith. A few husbands call their wives by their first names. In Sense and Sensibility , John Dashwood calls his ghastly wife "My dear Fanny", though she addresses him as "My dear Mr Dashwood". In Emma , Mr Elton flaunts his use of his wife's Christian name. "Shall we walk, Augusta?" he says to her in front of the group at Box Hill. It is almost ostentatious. "Happy creature! He called her 'Augusta.' How delightful!" says stupid Harriet Smith, after first meeting the vicar's monstrous new wife. Her exclamation indicates that the Eltons are behaving in an unusual, perhaps modish, manner. Mr Elton's flourishing of "Augusta" is made the more repellent by Mrs Elton's mock-coy revelation that he wrote an acrostic on her name while courting her in Bath. Yet it is not simply "wrong" to use your wife's Christian name. In Persuasion Admiral Croft addresses his wife as "Sophy". This is at one with his breezy good-heartedness, and a sign of the couple's closeness. Such is his uxoriousness that, as he struggles to remember Louisa Musgrove's frothy name, he frankly wishes that all women were called Sophy. Meanwhile his wife addresses him as "my dear admiral". He is one of those men (Mr Palmer, Mr Bennet, Mr Weston, Dr Grant) whose first name remains undeclared. The mere use of a person's Christian name is electric. In Sense and Sensibility Elinor overhears Willoughby discussing the gift of a horse with her sister and saying, "Marianne, the horse is still yours." It can mean only one thing. "From that moment she doubted not of their being engaged to each other." A woman who lets a man speak her name has given him a special power. But it is even rarer for a woman to call a man by his first name. Mr Knightley asks Emma to call him George, but she won't. "Impossible! - I never can call you any thing but 'Mr Knightley'." Why is Mr Perry getting a carriage? The plot of Emma turns on Frank Churchill's "blunder" in mentioning the likelihood of Mr Perry, the local apothecary, "setting up his carriage". Frank knows because of his secret correspondence with Jane Fairfax, and is therefore in difficulties when asked by Mrs Weston how he found out. The news is telling. Mr Perry is evidently making so much money from the hypochondriacs of Highbury that he can accede to his wife's desire for a carriage. The Austens themselves owned a carriage for a year or two in the late 1790s but then had to give it up. It would have taken an income of about £1,000 a year to make a carriage affordable, well beyond most genteel households. Mr Perry can use his carriage to make his lucrative house calls. The "intelligent, gentlemanlike" practitioner is a kind of therapist, whose business is humouring his clucking patients. He is first seen tactfully failing to contradict Mr Woodhouse's absurd opinion that wedding cake is harmful. He agrees that it "might certainly disagree with many - perhaps with most people, unless taken moderately". Though "all the little Perrys" are soon seen "with a slice of Mrs Weston's wedding-cake in their hands". Their father is a man who makes his handsome living from echoing the prejudices of his clients. Frank Churchill later tries a joke about Mr Perry's earnings, suggesting that if a ball were to be held at the Crown instead of at Randalls there would be less danger of anyone catching a cold. "Mr Perry might have reason to regret the alteration, but nobody else could." Arch-hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse replies "rather warmly", deeply offended at the suggestion that his apothecary relishes minor ailments: "Mr Perry is extremely concerned when any of us are ill." Yet he is getting a carriage because he has battened on the hypochondriacs of Regency England. Who is wearing mourning? Lots of people. Near the end of Emma , Mrs Churchill's death makes it possible for Frank Churchill to marry Jane Fairfax. When Frank meets Emma after the announcement of his engagement, he is smiling and laughing on this "most happy day", but suited, we should realise, all in black. We are not told this: Austen's first readers would have "seen" this garb, and registered the clash of official sorrow and private happiness. The deaths of close kin required a period of full (or "deep") mourning - in which clothes were predominantly black - followed by an equal period of "second" or "slight" mourning. Austen's own letters to her sister are full of chat about adapting clothing to mark the death of this or that relative. On hearing of Mrs Churchill's death, Mr Weston shakes his head solemnly while thinking - Austen cannot resist telling us - "that his mourning should be as handsome as possible". His wife, meanwhile, sits "sighing and moralising over her broad hems". Austen's satire is entirely tolerant. At the end of Mansfield Park , Mary Crawford and Mrs Grant begin a new life together, clad in full mourning because of the death of Dr Grant. Their mourning is not grief. We take it that, even in their black clothes, they are delighted to be rid of an irksome impediment to their sisterly friendship. Austen likes us to notice how official mourners fail to grieve. In Persuasion , Captain Benwick is "in mourning" for Fanny Harville's loss, which means not just that he is sad, but that he is actually wearing black, as the Harvilles are likely to be. Anne learns the story of their shared tragedy, but then their clothes would already have made her curious. If we do not see these clothes we lose something, for Captain Benwick must either eschew his mourning dress while paying his attentions to Louisa Musgrove, or court her while wearing it. Either possibility gives special force to Captain Harville's later exclamation to Anne: "Poor Fanny! she would not have forgotten him so soon." Mourning dress is, after all, donned in order to stop you escaping from the memory of the dead person. Where does Wickham have a tryst with Georgiana Darcy? By the seaside - where else? The near-seduction of Mr Darcy's sister is staged with the help of the perfidious ex-governess Mrs Younge at Ramsgate, on the Kent coast, where, we infer, Georgiana Darcy is at Wickham's mercy. Only her brother's last-minute arrival saves her. It is dangerous by the sea. Austen had something particular against Ramsgate, where her sailor brother Francis was stationed in 1803-4. In a letter to Cassandra in 1813 she refers to a friend who has decided to move to Ramsgate and exclaims: "Bad Taste!" In Mansfield Park , Thomas Bertram boastfully describes his flirtatious behaviour in Ramsgate with the younger Miss Sneyd, whoever she be. On arrival in the town, he and Sneyd find "Mrs and the two Miss Sneyds ... out on the pier ... with others of their acquaintance." "Mrs Sneyd was surrounded by men," he recalls. Sex is in the air in Ramsgate. Feckless Tom Bertram is a haunter of seaside resorts. Returning from Antigua, he does not dutifully come home to his mother and siblings, but goes to Weymouth . Later in the novel, Julia Bertram accompanies Mr and Mrs Rushworth to Brighton where she meets up with Mr Yates, with whom she elopes. Brighton is truly dangerous. Lydia Bennet meets Wickham there and elopes with him. In Austen's novels, seaside resorts are places for flirtations and engagements, attachments and elopements, love and sex. And honeymoons. In S ense and Sensibility Lucy Steele marries Robert Ferrars and they go on honeymoon to Dawlish in Devon. Emma (who has never seen the sea) and Mr Knightley, once engaged, plan a "fortnight's absence in a tour to the sea-side" following their marriage. You might say that once Emma has truly discovered love she is bound, at last, for the seaside. It will be by the sea that she and Mr Knightley begin a sexual relationship. Who marries for sex? Austen's stories rely on an acknowledgment of men's sexual appetites, which explain why that "truth universally acknowledged" - an affluent bachelor's desire for a wife - is in fact true. There are several men in Austen's fiction who "want" a wife for reasons beyond financial calculation. Mr Collins wants one; Charles Musgrove wanted one. The former hoped to please Lady Catherine de Bourgh, but surely had other reasons. The latter, having been turned down by Anne Elliot, rationally opted for her younger sister. We might surmise that a desire for sexual release motivated both "young" men, and that early 19th-century readers would have understood this. In Emma , Mr Elton, the Highbury vicar, is "a young man living alone without liking it". That last phrase carries a weight of meaning. Only a wilfully innocent reader could think that he yearns for a wife just to choose his fabrics and argue with his cook. Austen's narratives depend on our imagining male sexual needs. Catching us wondering how Mr Palmer in Sense and Sensibility , an intelligent but ill-natured man, could possibly have married a woman as idiotic as Charlotte Jennings, Austen lets Elinor reflect on the puzzle. "His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman - but she knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it." It is an extraordinary judgment, for Mr Palmer is paired with a fool for the rest of his days. Elinor has seen this happen often. His error has been his yen for "beauty" - or, we might say, "sex appeal". At this stage of the novel, Charlotte Palmer is heavily pregnant (though he is scarcely able to talk to his wife, he does have sex with her). Perhaps her advanced state of pregnancy means a temporary denial of conjugal solace. More reason for his grumpiness. Why does Robert Ferrars marry Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility ? All the evidence is for a process of sexual intoxication that Lucy, who has "considerable beauty", manages with great skill. He marries her "speedily" because he wants her. She trades on sexual allure (not mere bluff - we are explicitly told of the "great happiness" of their honeymoon). Mr Bennet's choice of Mrs Bennet has also been sensually determined. In the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice , his joke about his wife not accompanying his daughters to meet Mr Bingley lest he "like you the best of the party" has a hint of ruefulness. As a young man he was "captivated by youth and beauty". Having made his mistake, he must live with it. And after all, we can infer that Mr and Mrs Bennet have carried on an active sex life well into middle age as, "for many years after Lydia's birth", Mrs Bennet is sure that they will eventually have a son. What does Captain Benwick say in Persuasion? Nothing worth telling us. T here is a special group of Austen characters who may talk and talk, but never get a word of their speech quoted. Captain Benwick is a member . On her first evening in Lyme, Anne gets him for company and finds that, though initially "shy", he has plenty to say, notably about his "taste in reading". Soon he is talking about poetry and repeating the chunks of Scott and Byron that he has got by heart. He has found out the lines that seem to dignify his own love-lorn feelings. Keen to avoid the conversation of Captain Wentworth, Anne spends most of the evening with Captain Benwick. He is full of quotations himself, but says precisely nothing that the author thinks worth quoting. The next day Captain Benwick seeks Anne out and he is soon talking again, disputing over books. Captain Harville is grateful to her for "making that poor fellow talk so much". The sense is delicately given that Anne is becoming the victim of this previously silent man who has so readily discovered the consolation of talk. As the party walks along the Cobb for a last time before leaving, "Anne found Captain Benwick again drawing near her". He is going to talk and recite some more, but Austen does not tax the reader with what he says. Her heroine's response is charitable: "She gladly gave him all her attention as long as attention was possible." Not enough attention for any of his words to lodge. It feels like Austen's private joke about a man who recites rather than converses. When Charles Musgrove returns from Lyme he tells Anne about Captain Benwick talking. "'Oh! He talks of you,' cried Charles, 'in such terms ... His head is full of some books that he is reading upon your recommendation, and he wants to talk to you about them ... I overheard him telling Henrietta all about it.'" He keeps being talked about as talking, but his own words are kept from us. So, in some odd way, he never fully exists. Who has the shortest successful courtship? Among Austen heroines, it is Catherine Moreland. Northanger Abbey being the shortest of Austen's novels, its love story is also the most rapid. The novel is full of haste - from the progress of Catherine and Isabella's friendship, through John Thorpe's boasts about the speed of his travel, to Colonel Tilney's constant impatience and hurry. ( Northanger Abbey has more precise times of day than any other Austen novel.) The time between Catherine's arrival in Bath and her departure from Northanger Abbey is only 11 weeks: a brief acquaintance on which to base a married life together. Briefer still, as during those 11 weeks Henry Tilney has spent some time away at his parish, leaving Catherine at Northanger Abbey with his sister. Having elicited such a speedy proposal from Henry Tilney, Austen reassures us by telling us that he and Catherine in fact marry "within a twelvemonth" of their first meeting - not much less than the year allowed Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy between their first encounter and their nuptials. Other characters are speedier than Catherine and Henry. Mr Elton, wounded after being rejected by Emma, goes to Bath and writes to Mr Cole just four weeks later to announce his engagement to a woman he had never met before. Charlotte Lucas's notorious advice in Pride and Prejudice is to be as speedy as possible. In order to fix Mr Bingley's intentions, she tells Elizabeth, Jane Bennet "should ... make the most of every half-hour in which she can command his attention. When she is secure of him, there will be more leisure for falling in love as much as she chooses." A lengthy courtship has no advantages: "It is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life." The shortest courtship imaginable is indeed Mr Collins's of Charlotte, lasting as it does from dinner-time to night-time of a single day, all of it spent in the voluble company of others. Which novel's plot relies on the weather? All of them. Austen is a genius with the weather, making it the very principle of chance entering her narratives. Sense and Sensibility is kicked into life by a misjudgment about the weather: Marianne goes walking on the Devon hills with her younger sister Margaret, convincing herself that "the partial sunshine of a showery sky" bodes well. Marianne's "declaration that the day would be lastingly fair" is utter folly, revealed when "a driving rain set full in their face". Fleeing for home, Marianne trips and is rescued by the handsome Willoughby. It might seem a fortunate accident, the beginning of a romance, but Marianne's determination to delude herself about the weather bodes ill. The weather variously throws lovers together or separates them in each novel, nowhere more decisively than in Emma . Our heroine is contemplating the possible pairing of Mr Knightley and Harriet Smith. The world is narrowing. "A cold stormy rain set in" - unseasonal for July. "The weather affected Mr Woodhouse," requiring Emma ceaselessly to be attentive to him in order to keep him "tolerably comfortable". The evening of rain lengthens out like the long prospect of her future days with only her father for company. But then "the wind changed into a softer quarter; the clouds were carried off; the sun appeared; it was summer again". Mr Knightley arrives and, while Mr Perry consoles Mr Woodhouse for his weather-induced indisposition, he walks with Emma in the garden. At the critical moment in their conversation, he offers a revelation and Emma declines to know it - she dreads him speaking lovingly of Harriet. They reach the house but she decides to "take another turn". A benign climate blesses their exchange, and he can tell her not that he wishes to marry Harriet, but that he loves her. It is the walk in the sudden fine weather that allows for Mr Knightley's proposal, unpremeditated before he discovers the occasion. The shrewd reader will regard the final betrothal of Emma and Mr Knightley as inevitable, from the moment we know that he is the only person ever to find fault with her. But the best comedy recruits chance, and the lucky change of weather in Emma is there to let us imagine how it might have been otherwise. o John Mullan's What Matters in Jane Austen? is published by Bloomsbury (£14.99) on 7 June. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop . Jane Austen Fiction John Mullan guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
Waterstones kindle a deal for destruction with Amazon
21.05.2012, 10:41:59
Waterstones promise to make ebooks 'dramatically better' by teaming up with Amazon, but will you be browsing the shelves with your Kindle? Monday morning and already it's the end of the world . Instead of teaming up with Barnes and Noble to cast out the "ruthless money-making devil" Amazon , a tired-looking James Daunt has pulled up a chair and supped with him, striking a deal to "launch new e-reading services and offer Kindle digital devices through its UK shops" . Is that what he meant when he talked about being " different from Amazon ... [and] better "? Daunt said it was a "truly exciting prospect" to welcome a ravening tiger into his living room. Er no. Sorry, what he's really excited about is harnessing "the respective strengths of Waterstones and Amazon to provide a dramatically better digital reading experience for our customers." Meanwhile Jeff Bezos said that Waterstones was his favourite bookseller, and that he was looking forward to getting his teeth into the only remaining rival on the high street - I mean bringing together "digital reading and the physical bookstore". Writers and agents reacted with incredulity to a deal which seems to do little more for Waterstones than legitimise Amazon's controversial price-check app . Maybe Daunt's called this right, and there's no point in competing with the "best digital readers", but it's hard to see how physical bookshops can make the Kindle "dramatically better". The thinking seems to be that since we all like browsing in bookshops, and we all like reading on digital devices, combining the "singular pleasures of browsing a curated bookshop" with the "best digital readers" will make for the best of both worlds. But that seems to fundamentally misunderstand the appeal of the digital reading experience. Full disclosure: I don't use a Kindle, but price aside , the attraction of the Kindle experience seems to be that you can have lots of books, straight away - neither of which is usually much of a problem when you're standing in a bookshop. And the risk that Waterstones runs is that by welcoming its greatest rival onto the high street it puts Amazon's device into the hands of its most committed customers. The terms of the deal won't be announced until the autumn, but the success or failure of this deal will be determined by what people think digital reading is. So, Kindle users, and ... er ... book readers alike: will you be heading down to your local Waterstones to join James Daunt at the devil's table, or is this turkeys voting for Christmas? Ebooks Amazon.com Kindle Waterstone's Publishing Richard Lea guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
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