Jane Austen Society of North America, Southwest Region

 

Robert Rodi

John Kessel discussed his book Pride and Prometheus, a mashup of Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein.

Robert Rodi

Anne Mellor and Victoria Shorr

Watch an excerpt from Nancy Gallagher and Lynda Hall’s reading of John Kessel’s script of an imagined conversation between Mary Shelley and Jane Austen.
Robert Rodi

Jane Boltz and Melissa Buell

Robert Rodi

The Chapman Library put together a display of materials from Austen and Shelley specially for our event.

Robert Rodi

A book signing followed the event.

Robert Rodi

The day also included a white elephant sale.

Robert Rodi
Robert Rodi
Robert Rodi

September 2019

Jane Austen Meets Mary Shelley

September 14, 2019

Chapman University

Speakers:

John Kessel — Mary, Jane and Me

 

Anne Mellor — Mothering Monsters: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Genetic Engineering

 

Victoria Shorr — The Midnight Moment

Highlights

Nearly 140 members and guests gathered at Chapman University for “Jane Austen Meets Mary Shelley” on September 14. Numerous students from both Chapman University and Azusa Pacific University joined JASNA Southwest members for this event, which featured speakers John Kessel, Anne Mellor and Victoria Shorr.
 
Following continental breakfast and a white elephant sale, John Kessel launched the day’s presentations with his talk “Mary, Jane and Me.”
 
Best known for his science fiction novels, including Pride and Prometheus—a mashup of Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein—and numerous short stories, Kessel served as first director of the MFA program in creative writing at North Carolina State University, where he has taught since 1982. Observing that some people hold a narrow view of the genre, he noted that, for him, science fiction encompasses gender issues and other social concerns.
 
In describing his idea for Pride and Prometheus, he said, “I was unforgivably ignorant about the raft of novels and stories about Mary Bennet that have been written by Austen fans, and of the community of fan-fiction writers who have produced rules for such works.” He described those rules as including creation of a transformative work, being respectful of the material being “borrowed” and having an “HEA” (happily ever after) ending. He defines his work as not simply fan fiction, although he is a fan, but as critical fiction.  
 
He referenced such works of critical fiction as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (the backstory behind Jane Eyre from the perspective of Mr. Rochester’s first wife) and John Gardner’s Grendel (a retelling of Beowulf from the antagonist’s viewpoint).
 
The challenge of “mating the disparate tales” of Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein in Pride and Prometheus made for a fascinating project, he said. While Austen treated her characters with cool distance, irony and dry humor, Shelley’s novel is full of humorless “histrionic excess, chases and murders.” In Austen, he noted, “There’s plenty of psychological distress but, by and large, the most violent thing that happens is an overheard conversation or someone getting caught in the rain. Frankenstein’s Creature does not belong in a Regency drawing room. The Bennet sisters do not belong in a gothic 19th century laboratory.”
 
Nancy Gallagher (Mary Shelley) and Lynda Hall (Jane Austen) presented a reading of Kessel’s short script imagining a conversation between the two authors.
 
Next, UCLA Emeritus Distinguished Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies Anne Mellor spoke on the topic of “Mothering Monsters: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Genetic Engineering.” She is the author of books on Mary Shelley, Romantic women writers (including Jane Austen), William Blake and many other British Romantic poets.
 
Mellor began by pointing out that Mary Shelley and Jane Austen “had the same mother”: Mary Wollstonecraft, author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women, was Mary Shelley’s biological mother and Jane Austen’s intellectual mother, according to Mellor. She argued that “Austen was a devout disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft to the extent that she takes characters from Wollstonecraft’s writings, she quotes Wollstonecraft word for word but never with quotation marks because a respectable woman, in her day, could no longer openly identify with that radical, feminist, whore, atheist known as Mary Wollstonecraft.”
 
Mellor’s discussion primarily focused on Shelley and how she gave birth to Frankenstein, describing it as “a myth about a human being giving birth to another through mechanical processes.” She added: “This narrative has become the myth of modern science—the master narrative for the ways in which man’s attempts to control and improve the workings of nature can have unintended and even monstrous consequences.”
 
Jokingly, she offered an alternative description of the novel as “the narrative of what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman.”
 
Mellor drew attention to the parallels between Mary Shelley’s life and the Creature’s life in Frankenstein. She suggests that for the first time in English literature a novel embodies the pregnancy anxieties of a very young and frequently pregnant woman. She also explained that Shelley read and was well-informed about the latest scientific advancements and experiments of the time, including Erasmus Darwin’s theory of “single-sex propagation,” in which the woman’s role in giving birth is unnecessary.
 
For Shelley, “bad science” tries to intervene with, change or master nature. In the novel, nature pursues Victor with the very fire and electricity he stole to bring the Creature to life. The novel’s violent storms also reflect the climate and extreme weather caused by the volcanic eruption of Tambora and represent a manifestation of mother nature’s elemental powers.
 
For Mellor, the novel suggests that where there is no mother, monsters are created. She cautions against scientists who fail to take ethical responsibility for the predictable and even unintended consequences of their experiments and technological developments that can destroy life as we know it, describing the potential impact of today’s CRISPR Cas9 gene-editing technologies.
 
After a boxed lunch and trivia contest, with prizes of books by the speakers, Victoria Shorr gave a presentation, “The Midnight Moment” based on her book Midnight: Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning. Published in March 2019, Midnight focuses on three women as they face their greatest challenge—a homeless Jane Austen, Joan of Arc at the stake and Mary Shelley in Italy as she contemplates a potential future without her husband when he is lost at sea.
 
Shorr—whose first novel, Backlands, was named one of Booklist’s top 10 first novels of 2015—co-founded the Archer School for Girls and the Pine Ridge Girls’ School in South Dakota, the first independent, culturally based, college-preparatory school for girls on a Native reservation in America.
 
She read from the Austen segments of Midnight, which focus on Austen’s acceptance of a brilliant marriage proposal just when she, her mother and sister most needed the independence her marriage to Harris Bigg-Wither would have brought them — and the following morning, when she told him she had changed her mind. Shorr said she was drawn not to the witty, clever, superbly in control, intimidating Jane Austen but to the lesser-known Austen as the homeless woman, the unpublished author with no money and nowhere to live. If Austen had accepted the proposal, it would have altered the course of her life, and ours.
 
Austen would have been mistress of her own home, surrounded by comforts and children, and not dependent on her brothers and their wives—but perhaps would not have become an author. In this midnight moment, Shorr explained, Austen “would have been forced to stand and gaze into the void and figure out who she was and what she did next.”  

Presenters

John Kessel is the author of the novels Pride and Prometheus, The Moon and the Other, Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice and, in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, Freedom Beach. His short story collections are Meeting in Infinity (a New York Times Notable Book), The Pure Product and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories.

Kessel’s stories have twice received the Nebula Award given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, in addition to the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Locus Poll, the James Tiptree Jr. Award. His play Faustfeathers won the Paul Green Playwright’s Prize, and his story “A Clean Escape” was adapted as an episode of the ABC TV series Masters of Science Fiction. In 2009 his story “Pride and Prometheus” received both the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award.

With Jim Kelly, he has edited five anthologies of stories re-visioning contemporary short sf, most recently Digital Rapture: The Singuarity Anthology.

Kessel holds a BA in Physics and English and a PhD in American Literature. He helped found and served as the first director of the MFA program in creative writing at North Carolina State University, where he has taught since 1982. He lives and works in Raleigh, N.C., with his wife, author Therese Anne Fowler. 

Anne K. Mellor is a Emeritus Distinguished Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at UCLA and the author of books on Mary Shelley, Romantic women writers (including Jane Austen), William Blake and many other British Romantic poets. Her book Mothers of the Nation – Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (2000) argues that women writers were instrumental in shaping public opinion during the Romantic era. She is the author of Blake’s Human Form Divine (1974), English Romantic Irony (1980), Mary Shelley: Her Fiction, Her Life, Her Monsters (1988) and Romanticism and Gender (1993). She edited the first collection of feminist essays on Romantic writing, Romanticism and Feminism (1988), and is the co-editor of an anthology of canon-transforming Romantic writing, British Literature 1780-1830, as well as of The Other Mary Shelley (1993) and Passionate Encounters in a Time of Sensibility (2000).

In 1999 she received the Keats-Shelley Association Distinguished Scholar Award; she has been the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, three National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminar for College Teachers Directorships, and American Council of Learned Societies, NEH, Rockefeller and Australian National University Fellowships in the Humanities. She received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 2002 and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the English Association in 2004.

She earned her BA summa cum laude from Brown University and her MA and PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Victoria Shorr‘s first novel, Backlands, was named one of Booklist’s top-10 first novels of 2015. She co-founded the Archer School for Girls, and the Pine Ridge Girls’ School in South Dakota, the first independent, culturally based, college-prep school for girls on a Native reservation in America. Her most recent book, Midnight: Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning, was published in March 2019 and focuses on three women as they face their greatest challenge—a homeless Jane Austen, Joan of Arc at the stake and Mary Shelley in Italy as she contemplates a potential future without her husband. Shorr lives in New York and California. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College.