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This is incredible! Very resourceful, thank you. I’d love to see more of this. ✨

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Mar 5, 2023Liked by Plain Jane

Plain Jane, thank you for another fascinating blog today (5 March 2023) on the intersection of Black History Month and Women’s History Month. I want to pick up on your comment about Austen’s attitudes toward slavery in Mansfield Park. You mentioned the “dead silence” that greeted Fanny Price’s question (addressed to Sir Thomas) about slavery, and you ask, “But it’s not dead silence is it?” I never appreciated Mansfield Park until I attended my first Jane Austen Summer Program (JASP) in 2016, which focused on Mansfield Park. Professor Danielle Christmas taught us about Lord Mansfield and the implications of Austen’s use of his name. I just happened to have finished re-reading Helena Kelly’s 2016 book, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical this past week. Professor Kelly makes a compelling argument in her chapter on Mansfield Park, that the novel is an anti-slavery book from start to finish. She begins by reminding us that Mansfield Park is the only one of Austen’s novels not to be reviewed—Sir Walter Scott did not even mention the novel in his review of Emma, even though he summarizes the plots of Sense and Sensibility and of Pride and Prejudice. The British Critic, with its ties to the Anglican Church, praise Austen’s first two novels for their “sober and salutary maxims for the conduct of life.” Yet, the periodical ignores Mansfield Park. The irony is that the novel is disliked by twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers and critics because Fanny is such a moralistic character—especially when contrasted with Mary Crawford. Kelly’s answer to the “dead silence” of the critics toward Mansfield Park is that everything about the novel emphasizes slavery. Sir Thomas’s Antigua plantation is mentioned in the novel’s third chapter; the amorality of the Bertram family is, by implication, due to their ownership and profit from slaves. Fanny’s avowed love of William Cowper’s poetry would resonate with Austen’s readers: his poems are filled with anti-slavery sentiments; he even goes so far as to say, “I had much rather be myself the slave/ and wear the bonds, than fasten them on him” (from The Task). Maria’s allusion to Sterne’s a Sentimental Journey (“‘I can’t get out,’ as the starling said’”) comes from Sterne ‘s novel just before the narrator compares the starling to a slave—a well-known passage in Austen’s time. The Rev. Mr. Norris was also an allusion to slavery most of Austen’s audience could not have failed to recognize. A Mr. Norris is the chief pro-slavery villain of Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (1808), which Austen mentions so favorably in her letter to Cassandra on 24 January 1813 (Le Faye 078). As Kelly states, “Once Clarkson’s book had appeared, Norris was a name associated not just with slavery but with the lies and blatant hypocrisy that surrounded it” (170). Austen’s linking of a clergyman (Mr. Norris) with slavery is an indictment of the Church of England’s involvement in slavery. Kelly mentions that “in 2006, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, issued a formal apology for the Church of England’s involvement in slavery” (182). The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) owned a slave plantation on Barbuda (near Antigua); that society was part of the Church of England. It regularly bought new slaves and branded them. Church ownership of slaves was pointed to by pro-slavery advocates as proof that it was not sinful to own another human being. But Austen goes even further in Mansfield Park with a symbol in the chapters leading up to Fanny’s coming-out ball: the chain (a symbol of slavery) and the cross (the symbol of Christianity) are linked in Fanny’s deliberation about how to wear the cross that her brother William gave her. Since Anglican clergy own The British Critic, it should not surprise us that the periodical would not review Mansfield Park, given its overtly anti-slavery allusions. Kelly’s book gives many more examples of Austen’s allusions to slavery; I have only mentioned a few. So, in short, you are absolutely correct, Plain Jane, when you assert, “But it’s not dead silence is it?”

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Mar 5, 2023Liked by Plain Jane

I am astounded and amazed by the amount of information that you have uncovered about Africans and Blacks during the Regency and Gregorian period! I will definitely download this information and start investing into some of these books!

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The connections revealed in these lists are fascinating..I didn't know, for example, about Marlon James' interest in Jane Austen.

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Loved this post and the way you intersect both Black history and Women's history. Some great sounding texts to get my hands on! : )

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