Delayed snark

Some five years ago, my local chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America sponsored a discussion of Jane Austen at Home, the 2017 biography by Lucy Worsley.

Worsley is a legit historian—holder of a UK doctorate, presenter of BBC history programs, author of multiple books, and chief curator of the charity that looks after six of Britain’s most famous royal palaces. So amid her discussion of Austen’s decision to refuse Harris Bigg-Withers’ 1802 marriage proposal, I was startled to find this passage:

“As Jane herself put it, ‘there are as many forms of love as there are moments in time,’ ” Worsley wrote. “Why place married love so far above the rest?” (p. 176)

As blog readers will recall, just a year earlier I had selected this very “moments in time” line as #3 on my list of “The Top Five (Or, Actually, Six) Faux Jane Austen Quotes.” As I noted at the time, that line, though sometimes attributed to either Austen's Mansfield Park or “personal correspondence,” in fact comes from Patricia Rozema’s 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park.

But here was Lucy Worsley, legit historian, citing it! I was shaken. Had I overlooked a genuine Austen reference? I checked Worsley’s footnotes for chapter 18, but this line didn’t merit a citation. Hmm. Suspicious.

But no! At the back of the book, in a note on her sourcing, Worsley wrote, “All unreferenced quotations in the text come from Deirdre Le Faye’s edition of Jane Austen’s Letters (1995), retaining Jane’s own spelling. I have not cluttered the text with date references to the letters as it is such a simple matter to find them.”

Pace Worsley, however, it is actually not a simple matter to track down a random line nestled somewhere in Jane Austen’s letters—or to check whether a random line does, in fact, come from Austen’s correspondence.

Neither Le Faye’s 1995 edition of the Letters—348 pages of Austen’s correspondence, plus another 295 pages devoted to notes and indexes--nor the updated 2014 edition is available to the general reading public as a searchable ebook. (Students and academics with access to a university research library or an unusually wealthy public library may be able to access the letters via Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, but it appears that individuals living in North or South American cannot buy personal subscriptions.) Meanwhile, Lord Brabourne’s 1884 collection of Austen’s letters, which can be found online, is known to be incomplete and bowdlerized.

I suspected that lazy Googling had dumped Worsley—or, more likely, her research assistant—into the internet’s Faux Austen Quote morass. But unless I reread Austen’s letters with an eye for the “moments in time” line, I couldn’t prove it, and I didn’t have time for the reread. So I left Worsley unsnarked. It hurt to do it, but hey: a legit historian gets the benefit of the doubt.

But last month, my local chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America sponsored a discussion of Jane Austen’s letters. I was facilitating that discussion, so I read the letters from beginning to end, with care. And guess what? “Jane herself” did not write “there are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.”

Legit historian or not, Lucy Worsley mistook an Austen movie quote for the genuine article. Consider her officially snarked.