 Fy enw i'ch ei wneud i gwybod ychyn nhw, L still, sounds, and so much of the wonderful things that have been said today are on the specifics of writers who are not so well known, and I think I've learnt a huge amount from that. I may at the risk of boring you, I'm going to talk about two fairly established people. I must also thank Alexis and Lindsay for inviting me. It's a very nice thing to happen in my first months of some being retired. But I'd rather deplore my position at the end of a long day, I have to say. I was hoping that the place of the auditorium would sort of give, which is why I've got my PowerPoint. I don't really do PowerPoint. I was hoping that the auditorium would sort of go dark and you could all just snooze away and not notice that I've got some pictures to go with the text and so on. But never mind, here we all are enjoying our final time before I think fireworks in the dining room. I thought that was a specific, particularly attractive. I think it did fireworks in the dining room. So I think it's a very splendid way to finish a conference. OK. Well, I'm juxtaposing two influential biographies, William Godwin's of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. Memoirs of the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It's not a snappy title. Published in January 1798 and James Edward Austin Lee's sketch of his aunt. There's a great deal of fuss about whether you put a hyphen in Austin Lee. Tathen Sutherland does, and I don't, so for purposes of this paper there is no hyphen. Called A Memoir of Jane Austen published in December 1869. Godwin was the leading radical philosopher of the 1790s addicted to sincerity and reform through transforming individual consciousness. Austin Lee was a scribbling vicar loyal for his established church. They come together and being male authors writing about famous women. Both impose their own imagination and personality on subjects and texts. Each is silent in curious places and very loud in others. I'm considering what these men chose to stress and omit and how they interacted with what they saw as the gendered nature of their subjects. Both intended to manipulate the reputation of famous relatives regarding themselves and very much the executors of the image. Now the Godwins, nor Austin Lee's, is a biography in the modern sense. There's no footnotes and endnotes. Very little can be verified. There's a lot of attributed words which may come from memory or imagination. The 18th century Godwin had written on biography as a moral force through its depiction of notable individuals in their closet. What one might call a bourgeois literary subjectivity emerges as he tries to make sense of a life that's structured in time and he relates the adult personality to the child and its parenting. Matters assumed to be of importance by the time that the later Austin Lee is writing. Both men are dear to a romantic idea of authorship, making any work a self biography, a personal revelation, part self-conscious and part inadvertent. Godwin is actually writing his own memoirs when his wife died and he turned to writing hers and one might reasonably argue that what he has written is a joint biography in many ways. The gender difference in both cases works against identification, which seeps round the central woman to adhere to the men in the stories. Aha. Now why does it say please connect your laptop at the lectern via input position would you say? Shall I just try and press it anyway? We don't need to. Ah, so much for that. Well that of course is William Godwin. I'll start with his brilliant and intimate work. It seems so modern partially because of course it discusses sex, the prevailing concern of present day biography which insists on invading the private life. And very much the private physical life as well. And because the supposedly sexually liberated Wollstonecroft became a contemporary heroine for 1970s feminism. Inspired by Rousseau's autobiographical candor, Godwin valued being open, fair and scrupulous. He avoided the sentimental and cosy adjectives that adhere to most contemporary biographies of worthy women. Some of the valuable astringency comes from Wollstonecroft's own written material and memories which, like Boswell with Johnson, Godwin as an agent carefully harvested. I sometimes got the impression he was sort of going round after her for listening and writing. A bit like poor, well poor Johnson must have Boswell hanging round him on almost every occasion. So that what could become comfortably feminine such as her abandoning paid work to look after her dying mother is filtered through her bitter memory of her family because her parent was never grateful enough. Most is however, most of the memoirs is in Godwin's tone. In his preface he asserted that the fuller was the story of a life, the more, and I quote, we feel in ourselves an attachment to their fate and the sympathy in their excellences. He didn't flinch from the uncomfortable. Candor was necessary to convey consciousness and display what Virginia Woolf later called the experiment of her life. Godwin emphasised Wollstonecroft's fervent female friendships, a cliché in sentimental fiction, but less decorate in real life as it became excluding or same sex attachment. Possibly felt able because it comes early on so prefaces the central heterosexual romance. Fanny Blythe's Wollstonecroft's first truly emotional tie avoids sexual taint while being elevated through reference to the iconic meeting of Wetter and Charlotte in Goethe's book. Obviously I don't have a picture of Fanny Blythe so I'm having to make boo. Seeing Fanny as a formative relationship, Godwin noted the way Wollstonecroft swiftly moves from admiration to dominance. When he depicts men in her emotional life, there is he implies no such necessary progression. So Fanny serves less as an external love object prelude to the grand passions than as a substitute for the missing supportive family. Through the relationship, Godwin can display something of the usual childhood movement from submission to parental judgement to independence. By the way, he can't really be blamed for downplaying the very important relationship with sisters because they refused to cooperate with him. Quite rightly, obviously, since even though they didn't cooperate when a memoirs came out they lost many of the pupils in their school because of the effect of his revelations. What takes centre stage are Wollstonecroft's known relationships with men, Henry Fusley, Gilbert Imlet and of course himself. Two sexual outside marriage. The first non consummated one she herself delivered as platonic and intellectual. It's very very interesting how other people have talked about women's efforts to tell others that their relationships are intellectual, platonic and emotional and not sexual. But Godwin translates the whole thing into the physical. Wollstonecroft improves her appearance to attract Fusley to her body. When she fails, she leaves England for revolutionary France to heal her distempered mind. Over and over again you find in the memoirs Metafol's images of bodily injury that is actually standing in for some sort of emotional suffering. Godwin stresses the same physicality when she meets the American Gilbert Imlet and begins the sexual relationship. And I quote, for which her heart secretly panted. It's amazing stuff really for 1797. Where Fusley, like the sisters, had refused access to Wollstonecroft's letters, Imlet's are available to him, indeed edited by him. And this relation arrives in detail. A love that proves so destructive that she twice tried suicide is delivered movingly in vivid physical images. Wollstonecroft became a serpent on the rock casting off its old skin and appearing with brilliant sleekness and elasticity. In happiness her body changes, her eyes gain luster and her cheeks colour. In this context even suicide becomes justified, part of a pattern. Godwin of course had written on suicide as a possible moral choice. And in all this, in whatever she does, he insists that her revolutionary confidence was never extinguished. He must make this relationship, this departure from the morality of bold minds, as he puts it, acceptable to his readers. Otherwise they judge it an appalling lack of chastity. His argument is that the female predicament of forced celibacy is so problematic for a sensual woman. And by appeal to the ambiguous glory of Wollstonecroft's life, that sensibility that was destroying her. Her experience, this sort of amazing sensibility and the sensuality that she's experiencing through the misery of celibacy enjoying on a woman but not a man. This sort of experience that she's had with him, they would have had little effect, he says, on a man of a hard and insensible disposition. But she is endowed with the most exquisite and delicious sensibility and a mind almost of too finer texture to encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs. Disimpleasure is transport and disappointment is agony indescribable. No identification here. But where Godwin, as a man suffers intellectually, he assumes the same would happen to a woman. As a reviewer, Wollstonecroft in a way I think educates herself and she didn't have a huge amount of formal education. When she became a reviewer she read a lot of books on science and philosophy and everything else. And I think benefited hugely. Godwin however, who has also had to be a reviewer, but has had a better education, found it very cramping. And he said that the talent of a reviewer is touched with a torpedo of mediocrity. I think so expanded but really there's no relationship I think to Mary Wollstonecroft. The sad decline of the imaginary relationship is delivered in Wollstonecroft's travel book, Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, much admired by Godwin. Seamlessly this book enclosing rejection by one lover allows arrival of another. That's just couldn't think of what else. I had some mountains but I thought probably. Frontiers peace would be more to the point. But making power points is a bit like doing Facebook, isn't it? You have to learn what to put into these things. Conventions obviously built up. And maybe there's a book about it all but I haven't read it yet. Where am I? Through Godwin the woman of great sensibility and firmness of mind may at last be partnered and managed by a responsive man himself. Her expression of misery in the book he says dissolves us in tenderness at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration. He responds to her softness and gentleness and the romance of unbounded attachment. Even the Frank Godwin sense that the second sexual act outside marriage with himself is difficult to deliver to a sceptical potentially sensorious public. The love began, begins in, he says, refined and aerial delicacy. Its dynamics are expressed in the image of her resting her head on his shoulder. Their friend Mary Hayes had shown in fiction the danger of revealing a woman taking the initiative in love. Most of you know there's a remarkable book in which Mary Hayes actually uses the real letters that she had written to a somewhat unresponsive man. And it was a great co-celebr of the time. It's a very brave book, I think. Anyway, she had shown the dangers of a woman taking the initiative. And so he insists here that the sexual act was completely mutual. It came together in total equality. Not everyone would respond generously to his revelations. Godwin would lash out a bit later but in the first edition again. At the dull, squeamish and the formal, the demireps of polished society who ostracised Walsoncraft as a fallen woman. And he calls her a worshipper of domestic life, the firmest champion and the greatest ornament her sex ever had to boast. A woman with sentiments as pure, as refined and as delicate as ever inhabited a human heart. Rather overage for the pudding, I think, there. Especially if he's trying to win an audience for an acceptance of something that is outside the bounds of most people's experience. But he makes a very good claim that the related marriage was an androgynous experiment, a new revolutionary domesticity. The time together, as you all know, was cut short by death following a rival of the child who became Mary Shelley. Godwin's powerful, stark description of the 11 dreadful days of botched childbirth and lengthy dying without religious overtones is unprecedented in published writing and might indicate some influence from the medical writing he enjoyed. He very much becomes the sort of doctor rather than the priest or the friend during some of those days. Again, the physical images are memorable, if somewhat insensitive. Puppies drawing off the contaminated milk, efforts to rally the dying body, a house full of useless men listening to female pain. The emphasis on personal life suggests Godwin's main agenda in the memoirs to present himself and Walsoncroft as new literary types together. She is a modern female exemplar. Despite the central importance of her rational works declared in his title and on her gravestone, the indication of the rights of women, and his belief in her as a constant vindicator, he enclosed her in existing cultural norms, albeit revised. The gendered scheme of female sentiment, intuition and personal expressiveness against male reason, control, order and candor. In this context, his extraordinary revelations about her private life were justified. She was always feminine. His aim is most troublesome now, I think, in the treatment of what made her celebrated. Her literary works. Godwin opened his account of the composition of the two vindications of the rights of men and the rights of women by crowing that perhaps no woman writer ever had so much celebrity throughout Europe. Then he makes a response physical of vehement concussion. Her achievement comes through the support and careful manipulation of her publisher Joseph Johnson. Her ideas and the rights of men derive less from intellectual effort than from feeling. She wrote in a burst of indignation the resulting book being marked with the vehements and impetuousness of its eloquence. He said that it's intemperate, particularly in its treatment of Burke, who indeed comes out in a curiously feminised androgynus way, which I think Godwin found difficult. Her magnum opus, the rights of women, could not elicit the admiration Godwin gives to the early Mary of fiction, a primary sentimental work of which she grew ashamed, but which he claimed established the eminence of her genius. The rights of women is for him deficient and unequal, although its doctrines are important on behalf of oppressed and injured beauty. An odd synonym for women, I think, in this context, and he later drops it from another edition. It becomes a very bold and original production, with many of its sentiments undoubtedly of a rather masculine description. Some passages of a stern and rugged feature are incompatible with the writer's character. The admirable firmness of mind and unconquerable greatness of soul are allied to a somewhat Amazonian temper. In later editions of political justice, Godwin himself had moved from the rigorously rational, more rigorous than really anything that Mary Walsoncoft ever wrote, and certainly in the rights of women, where she always stressed heart and mind together, not just the reason, I think. He moved away from that to emphasise a more indirect and literary method to achieve his goal of changing consciousness. So I think in many ways he may be judging himself when he's judging Walsoncoft in this way, but only in part. Happily, this Amazonian is not the real woman. Inside remains a luxuriance of imagination and a trembling delicacy of sentiment. Although readers of the rights of women might have expected... There we go. That's the Roscoe portrait which he never uses. That was the one that was painted just that she was writing the rights of women. Readers of the rights of women might have expected a sturdy, muscular, raw-boned birago. They would actually encounter a lovely woman feminine in her manners. Here Godwin is overwriting his own first adverse impression. He judged Walsoncoft overbearing and gloomy. Experience of destructive passion had feminised her into a being deserving a man's love. Of course she is better displayed in his work and in hers. So the couple become complementary in character. Godwin presented himself as going towards the logical and metaphysical and Walsoncoft towards the picturesque. He aimed at intellectual distinction but lacked intuitive perception of intellectual beauty. She had intuition and imagination arriving at bold, correct judgment through and then once we get this quote in a kind of witchcraft. They could not but improve each other in their experimental marriage. By describing so fully the emotional trajectory of Walsoncoft's life stressing by implication the struggle of an affective desire and political aim Godwin personalised the feminist cause. Despite his expressed aim the revelations made it impossible for other respectable women to take Walsoncoft as a role model which had been something he had wished to happen. The amazing dizzying biography depicts and argues sometimes contradicting what it seems to imply as its author tries to create an ideal woman from a life of extremes he can at times only fall back on labelling feminine. Yet one has to remember the title and the tomb. That's actually the tomb of Mary Walsoncoft which says author of the vindication of the rights of women and he obviously had ordered the tomb. Now, I come back to him but we move on up the Victorian period. Godwin wrote soon after Mary Walsoncoft's death James Edward Austin Lee half a century after his aunt Jane Austin died. But both men present themselves as guardians of the flame creators of a suitable public image of a dead woman. Both stress their own involvement with the subjects as nephew and husband lover. Both give prominence to their own sex. Thomas Carlile had inaugurated a style of biography based on the old conversion narrative needing a progress towards something culturally approved by readers. Deeper piety, acceptance, understanding, those sort of things. Godwin's Rusovian way had a sort of perpetual conversions constantly to overcome dangers and move on. Austin Lee will not allow his aunt the status of the heroic man of letters who often followed this trajectory but he gives her a pious conclusion and lets the accepted commonplace nature of her life do duty for male literary heroics. Her retirement from the world becomes her glory. She is praised through negatives made positive for a woman. That's it. She never touched upon politics, law or medicine, subjects which some novel writers have ventured on rather too boldly. So much for Bernie and Charlotte Smith and Helen Marrow-Williams and Mary Hayes. Godwin relied on his memory, his experiences and Watson Cross oral and written words. For memory, Austin Lee could use a man only his childhood. Until 1814, he was unaware that his aunt was writing novels. Was actually a published author rather. And he had to rely on recollections of other family members. Neither man would quite have subscribed to Desmond McCarthy's definition of a biographer as an artist under oath. By the time he penned his memoir, Austin Lee must have realised that family memories had become stylised. They had been repeated over and over again. Because this is the period when Jane Austen does grow from obscurity into a posthumous fame. In the preface to the second edition, he admitted the difficulty of recovering what was merged half a century deep in oblivion. Godwin had initially cared little for the feelings of the living and paid the price. Austin Lee took such care not to offend that he obliterated it. Much of what he knew. The aunt, Mrs Lee Parrott, and her pilfering ways, for example. And perhaps he was waiting with propriety until the last of her generation, Brother Francis, died in 1865. But Godwin glorified his relationship with his subject. Austin Lee, the genealogist, glorified the family he shared with his aunt. The use of this term is very different at certain points. It has a sort of diminishing feeling about it. There's no reason why aunt should be a diminution of anything. But there's something about calling her, rather repeatedly, my aunt that does have that effect. I'd question whether her uncle would have quite the same. Or whether he would use it. I can't imagine it would be so. Where Godwin devotes space to his wife's lovers, he devotes it to Jane's male forebears, even cousins, all of course his own. But he's a doctor and umpire of her relations. Austin remained overshadowed by hers, dead and alive. Enclosed within the ideal family, she was properly surrounded by honourable men. That's the brothers. There must be somewhere getting them out of that cover and made bigger, but I don't know what it is. So just peer at it and try and see them. They're the honourable men, the brothers, who live long and rise high. They pierce through the obscurity of her domestic retirement. In his second edition, Austin Lee mentions an aspect much stressed by recent biographers, her experience of wet nursing, a common habit in her parents' class, but one that the radical Wolfenkraut deplored and regarded as a hurt of her own infancy. Though Godwin chose not to stress it. Writing at the end of the century, Austin Lee found a custom strange, she even rather quaint, I think. He added the detail without investigating any effect, lest it impinge on the idealised family portrait. Like Godwin with the missing, possibly insane brother Henry Wolfenkraut, Austin Lee omits mention of the handicapped brother George Austin. In a way, living with her mother and sister and protected and supported by her brothers, Jane Austen remains a child through her life. When the women come together finally in Chawton, they form the little party, maintaining in their rather cramped cottage. It doesn't look that cramped, but it is when you actually go into it. When you look what it looked like in the 19th century, it wasn't quite as prettified. Somehow it does look smaller in those, but in fact there are an awful lot of women in there and servants and so on. I think one can decently say that it was somewhat cramped. But in this cramped environment, they made a ladylike establishment. In the second edition, he was at pains to make the small house more gracious by comparing it to a past image and divorcing it from what he said, the present dilapidation. Austin's existence is confined within the family then. She lived in entire seclusion from the literary world, never met a literary equals or had her talent honed by superior intellects. A few very passing external male contacts being with, and I'm sure you all know the stories, but I should do them. Nonetheless, James Stanley O'Clock, the Prince Regent's Librarian. There he is. And after her later publisher, John Murray. I've also got, for some reason I haven't got John Murray, but I've got the Prince Regent. But it's so good that you have to like it. I mean, it doesn't say it's him, but it's a character on most people soon that it was. I don't think it could be anyone else. Stanley O'Clock, James Stanley O'Clock, was a real admirer, but nonetheless he urged Austin to write about a worthy clergyman like himself. Then, when she demurred, he asked her to write a romance on the noble German house of Sax Coburg. Now, it's interesting when you actually look at it. Austin Lee found the suggestions less ridiculous than we do. He noticed his aunt's surprise, but he comments only that Clark did not, and I quote, clearly apprehend the limits of her powers or the proper field for their exercise. His sister, who is rather tartar, called Caroline, called his treatment of this man merciful. For the person she called the rogue Murray, he clearly had far more respect than Austin herself. So he's treated with great respect in the memoir. In any case, nothing at all should interfere with the main outline. The famous poet Robert Salvi admired her, Austin Lee added, Salvi had probably heard from his own family connections of the charm of her private character. Imagining a meeting between the two literary giants, Austin and Walter Scott, he commented, I do not think it would at all have impaired the modest simplicity of her character had it occurred. Though Lord Macaulay enters as a Victorian admirer of that wonderful woman, he and other men are described as placing her, my quote, not indeed amongst the highest orders of genius. Her world is emphatically homemade and wholesome, and from this wholesome place the novels derive. They are free from vulgarity, though her period, of course, is more vulgar than the one Austin Lee himself inhabits. Her milieu is tame, moderate, middling and rural. Inside the little church, she brought all her fancies, her novels that is, into subjection to the piety which ruled her in life. Despite this almost rejection of the satiric sharp side of her work, it remained important to sever any possible fictional mockery from that life. Her characters, he says, are lifelike but never drawn from life. She dreaded an invasion of social proprieties. She created fictional love from intuitive principles of genius, her characters in tune with her wholesome work. Throughout her life she retained, my quote, a cheerful, contented disposition and an humble mind. The childhood that warped Mary Walsencroft into an angry writer here nurtured, quote, pure simple English talent. The satiric juvenilia, instead of showing the mocking origins of Jane Austen's art, indicated instead what the mature novelist rejected. She returned occasionally to the mode but only to amuse nephews and nieces, a very useful group that they can compensate for the only one female failure, her childlessness. In other words, she's feminine in a complete degree. The explicitness of sex and death that so shocked Godwin's public some years earlier is, of course, absent from the high Victorian memoir. There's no speculation of shared beds with men or women. Physical details even of jelly and sweet pears and headaches are mostly expunged from the quoted letters. Close to death in her surviving letters, Jane Austen mentioned bile and discoloration but even in these letters, added to the second edition, she stated mainly a spirit of humility and thankfulness. Godwin had declared Wilsoncraft without religious feeling in her dying though he recorded a drug-induced mention of heaven. He was so candid that he had to mention it but he also has to make sure that it has nothing to do with real heaven. Austen Lee, who was absent when Jane Austen died, described a Christian deathbed. At the end, she wanted nothing but death. The comic poem, which she died, had been mentioned earlier by her less circumspect brother Henry. Austen Lee deplored it and referred to it only in the phrase playfulness of spirit. This reference was removed in later editions. With less discomfort than Godwin but with similar intent, Austen Lee praised the feminine, dominant side of his subject. The woman who wrote brilliant novels did other suitable things with her for hands. None of us could throw spillicans in so perfect a circle. She wrote a clear hand. She folded and sealed letters with consummate neatness and was a fine needle woman, her speciality being satin stitch. In some, and I quote, the hand which painted so exquisitely with a pen could work as delicately with the needle. This is about the woman who is hailed later as the originator of the modern novel. The writing itself becomes domestic by being hidden. As you will know, it's Austen Lee who provides those details of her composing in the general sitting room, avoiding anybody but the family, knowing what she's doing, putting the blotting paper over her writing and so on. In the second edition he adds the famous detail of the creaking door which told her that somebody had to do with it. She wrote on a little mahogany writing desk. I imagine most writing desks are about the same size, but if she's writing it, it's little. If Byron's got one, it isn't presumably. And her creativity was qualified by revision and care. The emphasis constantly that she had to revise as she obviously did Jane Austen was still and humble. She wrote for her own amusement. Money, though acceptable, was not necessary for the moderate expenses of her quiet home. A point rather at odds with the quotation just below. And that's not the only one as you probably know. Like Godwin, Austen Lee declared his agenda at his close, aiming indebly to stamp his version of his female subject on the reader's mind. It is and the cultivation of domestic affections without any self-seeking or craving after applause. Her sweetness of temper never failed. In keeping with the sweetness, he couldn't use as front of peace Cassandra's grumpy portrait, the only portrait of Jane Austen. He had it prettified and this doll-like image then goes as a front of peace of his work. On a ten-pound note I think it's sad. I have a soft spot for grumpy Jane, actually. I think it brings the two women together and why on earth couldn't it be used? Obviously not. It never is. If anybody writes a newspaper about Jane Austen, it's always a pretty one. It's very, very used. Despite huge differences in skill, I'm going very fast. Despite one being the air of the enlightenment, the other of high Victorianism, the two male biographies coincide in their determination to reconcile the subject's achievements with approved gender images. Both of a sure sense of womanhood to impose, with the woman's crowning quality being defined according to the cultural moment, sensibility for the 18th century, sweetness of temper for the 19th. The towering intellectual achievement of both women is underplayed. For neither man, nor woman's fame is resting. Each biography up fronts the author and or his period, where Godwin provided an internal portrait, giving little sense of Wollstonecraft's appearance and surroundings. Austen Lee sees himself as a time traveller returning to a lost pastoral age for which he's nostalgic. There's also a more vulgar age and his comment on it serves to excuse the element of vulgarity in his celebrated aunt who chose to write of the middle classes. Yn hyn mae'r rhwng i'r rhan oherwydd, wrth gwrs, gael ein bod yn ymdyn nhw'n gweithio. Mae'r rhan oherwydd yn ymddangos yn gweithio bod chi'n gweithio. Mae'r rhwng yn ei bach o'i rhagorau. Ond yn y bach oherwydd, mae'r best ac yn ymdyn nhw'n gweithio yn y gweithio ei wneud o'i nhw'n gymryd. Mae'n rhan oherwydd yn ymdyn nhw'n gweithio, oes yn ymdyn nhw'n gweithio. Yn yr adnodd yma i'r gweithio ar hwn ar 1831, Catherine Gore proposed in her work, I quote, to transfer the familiar narrative of Miss Austin to a higher sphere of society. Austin Lee seems to wish that his aunt had done that for herself. And it's of course interesting that 20th century and 21st century films always raise the level and the memory becomes even the duquel place of Chatsworth. Both men give closure to the short interrupted female lives was kind of cross dyed at 38, Austin at 41, from a biographical but not creative point of view. It might have been as well if I think, actually I was going to go on about Jeffrey Scott and Madame de Charriere and writing about women's old age but I think this is a bit of a digression. I don't think men do write about women's old age very well. They seem to think it's the sort of infirmity that is peculiar to women and as though men don't grow old. The men did grow old actually. Godwin went on till 80 and Austin Lee went on to 76. Woodson Croft died without writing the promised second volume of the rights of women or the French Revolution and she died partway through the wrongs of women. Godwin controlling her papers couldn't conclude the novel but he presented it with his apologetic context asking indulgence from the reader of unrefined words. Austin left the unfinished Watsons and Sanderton and possibly persuasion. With less complete control Austin Lee and his sisters could only influence publication. To finish very quickly with response, Godwin's memoir as you all probably know was met with almost universal opprobium. Friends and enemies alike were appalled and of course fascinated by the amazing inappropriate candor of a supposedly grieving husband describing his wife's sexual life. According to Salvi he stripped his dead wife naked. It's the sort of autopsy image that keeps popping up in all this. The European magazine said that the frailties of this philosophical wanton should have been buried in oblivion. Though some admired Godwin's purpose the work was seized on by conservative press as proof that feminism equalled voracious sexuality and atheism and was a collection of pernicious doctrines of view lasting well into the next century. Vainey Johnson had tried to dissuade Godwin from revealing too much. The outcry now dissuaded him to some circumspection, less physical detail, more abstract argument. In the second edition in August sturdy muscular raw bones became rude pedantic and dictatorial. The state of celibacy remained but was qualified by alienation from anything gross and sensual. The analogy with Vetter and Charlotte for female friendship was dropped. With Fusili he connected affection with social and domestic sympathy downplaying sexual infatuation. With Imle he omitted the panting heart and the serpent image, stressing the connection as neither fickle nor capricious. The lack of control remained but to the suicide attempts he added justification. It mingled desperate and always great qualities. Since it implied culpable abandonment of a child he adds references to motherhood as well. With himself he abandoned the detail of the seducing romance of unbounded attachment relating to the letters in Sweden and he gets rid of the head on the shoulder which was his way of describing it originally. Assuring the supposed invisibility of her sex in this second edition, Wilsoncraft's forwardness became a departure from the morality of vulgar minds. The effect of her death on Godwin so vivid as a simple extinction of light in the first edition became an event hostile to the moral interests of mankind. In general the changes made Wilsoncraft less extraordinary, more typical. Women have a frame of body more delicate and susceptible of impression than men, wrote Godwin. Without rational education they were more unreservedly under the empire of feeling. Wilsoncraft still reasoned little but she'd lost her witchcraft. The word goes in the second edition. Warms overtopped boldness. So the woman who had subtly disputed the cultural construct of gender became firmly and lovingly ensconced within the binary scheme. None of this did any good. Nobody took any notions of the second edition much and in the 20th century when Wilsoncraft was really rediscovered in a big way when the personal becomes the political people are uncomfortable with the text. It's very stark contrast. I'm really, I'm finishing here. The world approved and lauded Austin Lee for his familial and literary efforts. His memoir was received with more favour than I had ventured to expect. Some critics now doubt the crucial influence but to me I think the evidence does suggest that there were far more readers for Jane Austen after the memoir. It sort of came out in a more, in a cheaper edition but I think the memoir does have quite a lot of power and it spreads this image of Dear Aunt Jane, the spinster writing in Royal Hampshire. The garden was forced to cut, expunge and justify. With his later editions Austin Lee was urged to add many more details always avoiding any embarrassment to the living. He could add text, extra letters, he puts in bits with the Watsons, he filleted, Sanderton and so on. He put in Lady Susan. But he always claims that he avoids what the family had rightly declined to publish. Both Austin and Wilsoncraft had died leaving the unfinished works. Godwin, as I mentioned, put something around them and publishes them. Austin would like to suppress them but there are other family members who have got copies and he's stuck so it's a big tussle. The tussle which still goes on with the portraits of Jane Austen as you may read occasionally in the press amongst the descendants of the various brothers. He puts in, as he found himself being so successful, he put in more and more details of the past life of the past life of the the the Royal Hampshire. So that again pushes Jane Austen into this position of being the almost the historian of a lost pastoral England and therefore she moves into a very conservative political position too, as a person who holds to a way of life that sadly is disappearing. It's very interesting, he also complains that that some people are liking that aspect too much and are not seeing her greatness and in some ways he dislikes certain readers and he seems to me he's only the first of many men who try to rescue Jane Austen from common readers and it's still going on and it's still sort of pulling that direction. Well I hope there's been some purpose in juxtaposing a militantly frank memoir and a pious fragmentary memorial both of providing an owed in prose to a dead woman who gives some status and whose inevitable silence perhaps induces some guilt. Both men search for something social and moral in themselves. Godwin wants to understand his psychological change, Austen Lee, his worldly position mediated by a homely aunt and a lost society. He yearns for his youth as Godwin for a past relationship. Both men then bounce their subjects off their own characters and place in the world. Virginia Woolford, myro of the experimental life of Mary Wollstonecroft, thought biography a window into culture, authors and subjects and so the biographer is equal to the subject. In these two works this conjunction of author and subject coincides with the gender difference by role and sex the men are in wolf's words in another context raised on a little eminence and both I think have the sort of specter that they have to get rid of the amazonian woman for Wollstonecroft the professional writer for for Austen Lee. In the end as literary works there's no comparison for while not falling into cloying sentimentality Austen Lee never comes close to Godwin's power of evocation. He's both a candid man as teller of his in the end caution retail and the circumspect man as teller of an exemplary one hugely influenced reticent biographers of women writers in the coming decades. But I want to end just with I think a necessary appreciation without these two writers and their easy access to print and I think that's really important as moderately distinguished men. We would know far less than we do of the amazing women they championed in their way. Happily neither said the last word on them. Thank you.