The Wykehamist
Thomson entertained us with their reading as the Bingleys, after which SGM delivered a talk on Austen’ s style, with a clear message –“ read Austen’ s novels!” Her enthusiasm in describing what made Austen’ s writing unique, I am sure, convinced the audience to take her advice. She explained to us how contemporary criticism of Austen remarked she was most concise, but how she skilfully embeds within that brevity a subtlety of expression, a dry wit, that is unparalleled. She highlighted her exercise of repetition at all levels of her writing, from the word to the volume, the rhythm of her prose and her masterful use of free indirect discourse.
After a measured reading by the brilliantly-colourfully-shirted DEP, LPFD read with great spirit a passage about strawberry-picking from Emma, which he prefaced by proposing that it was Austen writing in the stream-of-consciousness style, long before the Modernist movement with which it is associated. He called it a“ testimony to her genius”, writing with words that have a“ collective murmur … a life of their own”. He proceeded to eat a single strawberry after his reading.
Rishi Bhardwaj( E, 2020-) and Eva Crouch( G, 2024-) delivered a well-paced reading of an excerpt of Northanger Abbey, telling us the tragic context of Austen not having even £ 10 to buy back the rights to her first novel and let it be published, which it was not until after her death.
Then, running down from a couple rows above me in the audience, was RJHM( Coll: 2004-2009), who I was surprised, at the start, not to see with the other performers below, and so when he did appear on stage, book in hand, I was glad and reassured. He admitted that“ anyone who knows Mr Rattray will not find it surprising that I was roped into this on Meads path … and asked to write a song … but he had left before I could say anything”. He read, with great life and in such a way as to make sure you were there, from Pride and Prejudice continuing from where SJ and the Headmaster had finished, saying that it was a passage where you could“ trust Austen” that the novel would end as it was meant to, even if in the immediate moment it does not seem it.
Johnny Wyatt( C, 2021-) then read a passage from the same novel with lively impersonations. Imogen Millar and Edwin Fletcher( E, 2020-) introduced us to a work of Austen’ s we had perhaps not had heard of before, The History of England, by a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian, which she wrote at age fifteen as a satire of historians, and their pretension and textbooks. Her writing at such an age will perhaps encourage some second- and third-years to pick up a book – personally, I was more inclined to believe this“ ignorant” historian than any other.
JJLD( Coll:, 1988-1992) talked to us about“ the science of Jane Austen”, being asked to do so by, of course, EACR, who did not take“ but Mr Rattray, there is no science in Jane Austen” for an answer. And so, JJLD told us, with his booming smile and voice, about, for example, how much“ Catherine Morland would have loved Frankenstein”, even if Austen could never have read Shelley’ s novels. He demonstrated, with an imploding tin can, the kind of experiment that might have been used as entertainment in the period, and as part of the increasing attempt to move from superstition to science. He said,
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