Catharine, or The Bower, and: Henry and Eliza, and: The History of England, and: Love & Freindship (review)

244 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:2 Jane Austen. Catharine, or The Bower, ed. Juliet McMaster et al. Edmonton : Juvenilia Press, 1996. xvi + 66pp. ISBN 0-9698271-6-4; Henry and Eliza, ed. Karen L. Hartnick et al. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 1996. xx + 24pp. ISBN 0-9698271-7-2; The History ofEngland, ed. Jan Fergus et al. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 1995. xii + 40pp. ISBN 0-9698271-56 ; Love & Freindship, ed. Juliet McMaster et al. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 1995. xii + 48pp. ISBN 0-9698271-1-X. Readers of Eighteenth-Century Fiction will already be familiar with the history of Juliet McMaster' s innovative Juvenilia Press and its two previous Jane Austen editions, Jack & Alice and "Amelia Webster" and "The Three Sisters", reviewed by Lois A. Chaber in 1995 (8:81-88). Among the press's recent publications are four further early works by Austen. Two of these, Catharine and Love & Freindship, are edited by McMaster herself, together with students at the University of Alberta. Henry and Eliza is edited by Karen L. Hartnick, with tenth-grade students at the Brearley School, New York City, while The History ofEngland is edited by Jan Fergus, with students at Lehigh University. Each of the editions is illustrated and each contains full scholarly apparatus: introduction, note on the text, annotations, bibliography, and ancillary material. The briefest of these four works is Henry and Eliza, an exuberant story that Austen probably wrote in her early teens. Sarah Wagner-McCoy, the illustrator, has turned the characters into mice in Regency costumes, justifying her strategy with the disarming remark that Austen's "satirical writing style and goofy plot allowed me some creativity." Wagner-McCoy's ebullient style matches that of the youthful Austen, and her rendition of Eliza's wedding to Mr Cecil, tails protruding from their finery, makes a fine cover design. Much ingenuity has also gone into the mingling of text with illustration; in one case, a drawing of Eliza imprisoned at the Duchess's "private Newgate" is juxtaposed with a column of text resembling the "Ladder of ropes" through which the resourceful Eliza gains her freedom. Another pleasing feature of this edition is the reproduction of the first page of the manuscript in the Bodleian Library. Regrettably, though, the text follows that of Chapman in the Minor Works; the other three volumes all offer fresh transcriptions based on Austen's holographs. Despite the brevity of Henry and Eliza, five editors have compiled a total of fifty-two notes. Some of these notes provide critical interpretation, rather than explication; one, for example, points out that in Sanditon, "at the end of her life, JA put a gentleman among his haymakers, rather than separating the aristocrat from the people as in Henry and Eliza." Another, glossing the phrase "to educate her with care and cost," crisply observes that "alliteration palliates catechresis." A couple of jokes glossed by Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray in their recent Oxford edition of Austen's Catharine and Other Writings (1993) are not noted here: the leniency of Eliza's punishment (being turned out of doors) for stealing £50 from her "inhuman Benefactors," and the uneven number of guns (55) on her man-of-war. Henry and Eliza also contains three critical accounts of the story: a preface by Rachel Brownstein, an introduction by Karen Hartnick, and an afterword REVIEWS 245 by Ann Kelly. Brownstein writes elegantly about Austen's delight in literary conventions, while Hartnick takes a biographical approach, emphasizing parallels between the fictional Eliza and Austen's exotic cousin, Eliza de Feuillide. Kelly's rather strained feminist reading commends the heroine's "self-inventing energy," and contends that the story reveals Austen's belief in "the importance of self-gratification": we are clearly a long way here from the world of Mansfield Park. The historical Eliza also appears in Love & Freindship, an epistolary fiction dedicated to "Madame la Comtesse De Feuillide" by "Her obliged Humble Servant The Author." In a brief but penetrating preface, Juliet McMaster describes this burlesque of sentimental novels as "arguably the funniest short work of fiction in the English language." Wildly hyperbolic, with its alternately fainting heroines and its four long-lost grandchildren, Love & Freindship is a jeu...