22 dezembro 2004

The answers ...

Section one

1. Catherine Morland. Forget Babe Ruth - it's what we call "rounders".

2. In Persuasion, the Crofts' chaise almost "runs foul of a dung cart".

3. Yes. As officiating clergyman the Rev Elton performs the ceremony that unites Miss Woodhouse with Mr Knightley.

4. Sir Thomas Bertram, on his return from flogging slaves on his sugar plantation in Antigua. He means Miss Frances Price.

5. No. Austen's fiction is a smoke-free zone. Gentlemen never puffed in a lady's presence, any more than they swore, farted, or relieved themselves in the chamber pot behind the dining room screen.

Section two

1. First Impressions. Wise change, Jane.

2. No. The novel is, by reference to militia postings, identifiably set in the mid-1790s. It's 18th century. Back to the text, you hacks.

3. Wickham seduces Georgiana Darcy at Ramsgate when she is 14. He seduces Lydia Bennet, aged 15, in Brighton - then, as now, the philanderer's favourite resort. Given the later onset of menstruation at that time, Wickham qualifies as English fiction's first Humbert Humbert.

4. It's the card game that Jane and Bingley "prefer". They call it pontoon, the patriotic renaming of the French "vingt-et-un". There is a war going on, for God's sake.

5. According to Mr Collins, £800. This seems a vast sum - more than twice what Austen got from the lifetime sale of all her novels. It may be a printer's error or an example of Collins's sublime absurdity.

6. According to Bingley's sister, "tolerably good".

7. Almost the only thing we know about Kitty Bennet is that she "coughs". This was a death sentence in 1795.

8. "I believe it must date from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." Gold-digging minx. 9. There is dispute as to how the reader should take Mary Crawford's remark in Mansfield Park: "Certainly, my home at my uncle's brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices, I saw enough. No, do not be suspecting me of a pun." Would Austen, with a brother in the navy, not know about rum, bum and the lash? Equally, the devirginated Lydia's instruction to her maid, "to mend a great slit in my worked muslin gown" is surely double entendre, coming as it does from the novel's prime slut. The slit within the muslin is past mending.

10. Probably Mary, named after Wollstonecraft, the "clever" Bennet girl who is despised by her family for her bluestocking pretensions. Mary is destined to remain the spinster daughter, caring for her parents in their old age. That's what you get in Jane Austen's world for reading too many books. Read it and weep, Virginia Woolf. Lydia, the youngest daughter, possessed of "animal spirits" - sexual appetites - is a Bridget Jones before her time.

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