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Persuasions #10, 1988 Pages 99-103
“The Beautifull Cassandra” Illustrated JULIET McMASTER English Department, University of Alberta,
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E5 My idea for an illustrated version of “The Beautifull Cassandra” was
born at the 1987 conference in New York on the Juvenilia. I had read the little story before, but it
hadn’t really registered with me until I reread it for the conference. And then I was struck all of a heap by its
charm and its cheek. “Cassandra was the Daughter & the only
Daughter of a celebrated Millener in Bond Street,” the story begins.1 Her mother is the family bread-winner, and
her father, who claims to be “of noble Birth,” is a mere layabout, a childhood
version of Sir Walter Elliot. Cassandra’s day of adventures begins when she
falls in love with one of the bonnets her mother has made, and elopes with it. Her adventures include the conspicuous
consumption of six ices at a pastry-cook’s, and a trip to Hampstead and back in
a hackney coach: her progress there is rather like that of the grand old Duke
of York with his troops in the nursery rhyme: “He marched them up to the top of
the hill, / And he marched them down again.”
When the coachman demands his pay and she can find no money in her
pockets, Cassandra resourcefully plonks her bonnet on his head and runs away. When she gets home to her welcoming mother,
she “smiled & whispered to herself, ‘This is a day well spent.’ ” Between the New York and Chicago conferences I stole odd hours, indeed days, to work on my pictures. And in Chicago I had the chance to share them with the most knowledgeable and sympathetic audience I know, the members of JASNA. Here I can’t present the pictures, which are many and coloured. But I can talk about my idea.† Jane Austen describes “The Beautifull
Cassandra,” rather grandly, as “a Novel in Twelve Chapters.” But in fact it is a brief and contained tale,
only about 350 words without the chapter headings. It appears in Volume the First, and occupies 5 pages in
the manuscript (which is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford), and only about
3 pages in Chapman’s edition. It has so
far received hardly any attention (the most extended commentary on it I know is
Ellen Martin’s, published in the last Persuasions2), and it
is seldom mentioned in biographies or critical studies. But the young Jane Austen herself evidently
had a developed sense of its place in her oeuvre: In “Catharine,”
another work dedicated to her sister, she jokingly referred to it as having
“obtained a place in every library in the Kingdom, and run through threescore
Editions” (Minor Works, p. 192). “The Beautifull Cassandra” is different from
the other juvenilia: it is less sophisticated, in that it depends less on
effects of burlesque and the in-jokes of the literati. It has a simple story line, a journey from
home to the big world and back. In fact
(I thought when I first pondered it seriously) it’s like Peter Rabbit,
and many another story for children. My
inspiration was to present it as a story for children, in the manner of Beatrix
Potter. And so I envisage the
characters as small animals, dressed in clothes of the period. My beautiful Cassandra is a mouse, and her
adventures include encounters with a lizard, a guinea-pig, a squirrel and a
cat. The hackney coachman is a frog,
and his horse a tortoise. This may be
taking an unwarrantable liberty with Jane Austen’s text. But I don’t think children would think so. When you illustrate a story you have to think
hard about it. I think I can now claim
to be the world’s expert on “The Beautifull Cassandra”! I have deeply pondered its relation to Jane
Austen’s life and other work. Consider
the dating of it, for instance. Brian
Southam, the major authority on Jane Austen’s literary manuscripts, assigns the
story to any time between 1787 and 1790.3 But he overlooks what I take to be a suggestive piece of internal
evidence, the fact that the heroine has just “reached her sixteenth year.” Now I wouldn’t want to claim that Jane’s
sister Cassandra, to whom the story is dedicated, is the same Cassandra who is
the heroine of the story, the milliner’s daughter. But all the same, the joke between the two sisters partly depends
on the outrageous doings of the beautiful Cassandra as the possible doings of
the actual Cassandra. As a working
hypothesis, then, let’s say that both Cassandras were in their sixteenth year
when the story was written. Cassandra
was born on January 9, 1773, nearly three years before her younger sister. Jane would have been in her thirteenth year:
that is, twelve. This would make the
year of composition 1788.
“She next ascended a Hackney Coach & ordered it to
Hampstead.” What else was Jane doing in 1788? Well, that summer she went to Kent with
Cassandra and her parents to visit her great-uncle, Francis Austen of the Red
House in Sevenoaks. Philadelphia Walter
met them there, and wrote that Jane was “not at all pretty and very prim unlike
a girl of twelve.”4 On the
way home to Hampshire the Austen family stopped in London, and had dinner with
Eliza de Feuillide (or Eliza Hanson, as she was then) and her mother in Orchard
Street. Now Orchard Street is just round a couple of corners from Bond
Street, where the beautiful Cassandra’s mother has her milliner’s shop. Isn’t it likely that the two sisters went
window-shopping in the street famous for elegant clothing? (You will remember that the old mare driven
by the Watson sisters stops at the milliner’s quite automatically! – Minor Works, p. 322.) On such an occasion sister Cassandra could
well have declared herself in love with an irresistible bonnet, so providing
the seed of the tale that Jane was to dedicate to her sister. It’s still only a hypothesis, but I think
it’s a probable one. If Jane was for
once to renounce her principle of writing about those three or four families in
a country village, it’s likely to have been after a stimulating visit to the
metropolis. And if I’m right, that
makes this year, 1988, the bicentenary of the composition of “The Beautifull
Cassandra.” I rejoice in the story for various reasons, but
one of them is for its cheerfully liberated heroine. The young Jane is evidently reacting against the conventions that
confine women. The genteel female, we
know, was supposed to have a delicate appetite; but Cassandra “devoured six
ices” in quick succession. Ladies were
expected always to have their heads covered (one scholar speculates that Dr.
Johnson himself may never have seen a woman without either a bonnet or a cap;
and he was a married man); but Cassandra, after she has cleverly used her
bonnet to pay her coach bill, still confidently walks through the streets. Women weren’t supposed to travel alone, and
we know from Jane Austen’s letters that she constantly had to make arrangements
to travel under other people’s escort.
Fanny Burney’s Cecilia, for instance, has to call for the protection of
an utterly incompetent man, Mr. Simkins, “for her dread of being alone … in an
hackney-coach, was invincible.”5
But Cassandra goes alone on an impulsive pleasure trip to Hampstead and
back. Women were economically dependent
on men, and even when they were paying the shot themselves would customarily
hand over their purse to some man to do the paying for them. At the climax of Cecilia (which young
Jane knew well) the heroine actually goes mad during the difficult business of
paying off an importunate hackney coachman.
But Cassandra manages her “peremptory” hackney coachman with great
aplomb. This isn’t a moral story. It’s a story of pure self-assertion and
self-gratification, as are many stories about boys. To use a modern analogy: Maurice Sendak’s famous trilogy, Where
the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There,
has as protagonists two boys, Max and Mickey, and a girl, Ida. The boys are allowed to be authoritative and
self-assertive: “Let the wild rumpus start!” says Max to the Wild Things; and
it does. “Cock-a-Doddle Doo!” proclaims
Mickey, with unabashed frontal nudity.
But Sendak’s girl, Ida, has a moral lesson to learn. While she is self-indulgently playing her
horn, the goblins steal her baby sister and leave an ice-baby changeling in her
place. Ida, haunted by guilt, has to go
on a quest to recover the baby and placate her authoritative father. Cassandra is more like Max and Mickey than
Ida. She goes off on a self-indulgent
binge, and copes resourcefully with her world and its economy, and is never
made to be sorry or learn lessons. Her
day has been “a day well spent,” and highly satisfactory. “The Beautifull Cassandra,” like the other juvenilia, contains intimations of the great novels to come. Catherine Morland, who travels alone in an emergency, proves herself not to be a mere “shatter-brained creature.” Elizabeth Bennet is a descendant of Cassandra in being energetic and self-assertive, and we often see her running, or “jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity.” I think of Cassandra as the Mouse That Walks By Itself. She doesn’t need anybody else. She only curtseys to the eligible Viscount, who might have turned out to be the hero of one of the novels. She passes by the trembling Maria and the inquisitive widow, and gets on with her own affairs. So much for Love and Freindship. She has a brief romance with a bonnet, but she’s ready to part with that too without regrets. Her love for the bonnet turns out to be only a matter of First Impressions. The bonnet, besides Cassandra herself, is the
most important character in the tale.
And I have followed up Jane’s and Cassandra’s relations with bonnets
through the Letters. She writes
to Cassandra of one particular bonnet “on which you know my hopes of happiness
depend.” Sometimes she imagines a
bonnet as alive, with its own personality.
“I took the liberty a few days ago of asking your black bonnet to lend
me its cawl, which it very readily did, and by which I am able to give a
considerable improvement of dignity to my cap” (Letters, p. 37). She may not have been a milliner, like the
beautiful Cassandra’s mother in the story, but she seems to have been a real
pro at putting together the decorations for her headgear. “Instead of the black military feather I shall
put in the Cocquelicot one, as being smarter; – and besides Cocquelicot is to
be all the fashion this winter” (pp. 37-38).
That was the passage that decided me to make one of the feathers in my
Cassandra’s bonnet cocquelicot (or scarlet, the colour of a poppy). One day Jane went shopping for her sister to buy decorations for another bonnet. Flowers and fruit were in fashion, but she found the fruit was more expensive, so she had to consult Cassandra anew: “I cannot decide on the fruit till I hear from you again,” she wrote. “Besides, I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit. What do you think on that subject?” (p. 67). That was the passage that decided me to have flowers on the beautiful Cassandra’s bonnet. I chose daffodils because they are funny and expressive, and I wanted to show them sharing Cassandra’s experience – curtseying when she curtseys, and getting fat when she eats six ices. I have enormously enjoyed working in
collaboration with the young Jane, as her team-mate. My version of “The Beautifull Cassandra,” as a 32-page picture
book for children, including an afterword addressed to children on the relation
of this story to Jane Austen’s major novels, is currently under consideration
by a publisher. I envisage it as a little
book, like Beatrix Potter’s. And I hope
that one day we’ll have the chance to give it to our nieces and nephews, our
godchildren, children and grandchildren.
I think they’ll like it.
After all, it was written by one of themselves. † The color images have replaced the original black and white images for the on-line edition of this essay, courtesy of Juliet McMaster and Sono Nis Press. – C. Moss, JASNA Web Site Manager NOTES 1 “The Beautifull Cassandra” appears on pages 44
to 47 of Chapman’s edition of The Minor Works. 2 Ellen E. Martin, “The Madness of Jane Austen:
Metonymic Style and Literature’s Resistance to Interpretation,” Persuasions,
9 (1987), pp. 79-80. 3 B.C. Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary
Manuscripts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 16. 4 Quoted by David Waldron Smithers, “Jane
Austen’s Visit to Kent,” Kent Companion, 3, June/August, 1988, p. 7. 5 Frances Burney, Cecilia (1782), ed.
Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p.
890. |
