The Beautifull Cassandra (review)

306 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:3 Jane Austen. The Beautifull Cassandra. With illustrations and afterword by Juliet McMaster. Victoria, B.C.: Sono Nis Press, 1993. 36pp. $9.95. ISBN 1-55039041 -4. When Virginia Woolf described the Jane Austen of the Juvenilia in her Common Reader as a girl who "is laughing at the world," she was thinking of the fifteen-year-old who had adroitly lampooned sentimental fiction and schoolroom history in "Love and Freindship" and "The History of England." Juliet McMaster's exquisite illustrated edition of "The Beautifull Cassandra" provides a rare glimpse of Austen as a witty twelve-year-old. By presenting the brief, humorous text as a picture-book, McMaster has selected the best venue for the tale of Cassandra, who seizes a bonnet from her mother's millinery shop and takes it out for a day of adventure. Cassandra behaves in a highly unconventional fashion, travelling unaccompanied, knocking down the pastry cook instead of paying for her "ices," and ultimately relinquishing her bonnet in exchange for a ride in a coach. She returns safely home at nightfall to be warmly welcomed by her mother. The narrative is both childlike and precocious—childlike in its grammatical construction but mature in its dismantling of narrative conventions. In a scholarly edition the text reads far too swiftly; as a picture-book, however, the pace becomes much slower. Each sentence is set apart from the others to be slowly relished. By illustrating the story in the manner of Beatrix Potter, turning Cassandra into a mouse and the other characters into small animals dressed appropriately in period costume, McMaster provides a complex miniature world which complements the miniature, light-spirited picaresque tale. Austen transposes the rogue hero into a girl who roams London alone; behind the lampooning is the rich world of Fielding , Steme, and Burney. By transforming the heroine into an anthropomorphic mouse, McMaster provides a comparably rich pictorial context. Behind the drawings is the world of such 'Victorian children's-book illustrators as Crane, Caldecott, and Greenaway. When reading The Beautifull Cassandra with a small child, the adult savours the wit of Austen's text, while the child savours the wit of McMaster's pictures which distil the essence of the story. Each reader is skilled in one type of discourse: by sharing our respective "expert" knowledge, adult and child can enrich each other's experience of the book. An adult can explain what titles such as duke or countess and what words such as "peremptory" mean. A child can share the richness of the illustrations : how the daffodils trimming the bonnet change their stance according to their situation; how Cassandra's tail wraps around the stool when she eats her ices; and how, when Cassandra's "freind the Widow," depicted as a cat, is "squeezing her little Head thro' her less window," she extends her long claws (Chapter the Tenth). Adult and child laugh together on encountering the "Viscount of Squiggle a young Man, no less celebrated for his Accomplishments & Virtues, than for his Elegance & Beauty" (Chapter the Third). REVIEWS 307 The adult chuckles thinking of the procession of dazzling men to appear in Austen's writings, even appreciating the adroitness of McMaster's editorial amendments in writing out the blanks and dashes of the original text. Both child and adult laugh together at seeing McMaster's rendering of the fop as a striped lizard! The cover and layout of the book are very appealing. The small child, having duly corrected the spelling of "beautifuH" in the title, is encouraged to read the story alone. McMaster's perceptive anaylsis of The Beautifull Cassandra in the afterword is a rare instance of literary criticism aimed at a child audience and could be read by an older child. Yet while the afterword is being read by this adult to the younger child, the child can "read" the biography implicit in McMaster's drawing of Austen as a twelve-yearold girl and be reminded again that she too was a child when she wrote the tale. The drawing is evocative: Jane Austen is intently composing at her writing desk but with a half-smile that suggests her "secret laughter" at...