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??Thank you very much, Liz Anne — yes, as you know well, I’m approaching
the 20th anniversary of my insight that Jane Fairfax says “It must be
born(e)” near the end of the novel, because she is then in labor, after
having confined herself to Highbury for her last 2 trimesters. That was
when I finally realized, after 2 1/2 years of finding more and more clues
scattered among the 6 novels, that there were shadow stories in every one
of them.

I find brilliant your extension of the more mainstream idea of “elegance”
as (to channel Miss Bingley) an acquired accomplishment of higher class
women, as is your connecting that idea to the courtship/Prince of Whales
charade - brava!!

NANCY: “?The word vulgar did not have any meaning of obscenity, it just
meant "common" such as the common people- laborers and such. The word still
retained the meaning it had when the Vulgate Bible was published-- the
Bible in the language of the common people which at that time was Latin.
I think Emma means that assessing Jane's looks wasn't something a person
of the gentry and up would do-- though , of course, they did.”

Nancy, I think it’s pretty clear that even in JA’s era, the meanings of
"vulgar" as (i) a reference to social class, and as (II) a reference to a
lack of manners and “air” as per Miss Bingley (and Emma, whose snobbery is
similar), already had a great deal of overlap - if a woman was busy earning
a living by hard work, it was a luxury to “learn” how to behave with
refined manners.

But I particularly like Stephanie’s and your similar focus on the
unwittingly ironically vulgar behavior of a supposedly "elegant" woman
asserting and judging others as vulgar based on nothing other than class
snobbery. But...I don’t however think that’s how Emma meant it when she
thought it - that is what I think Austen meant for us to think about Emma
thinking her self-deluding meaning. JA clear understood the difference
between superficial "vulgarity" and the deeper, and truly meaningfully
wrong vulgarity of the heart, mind and soul.

That's exactly what JA’s niece Fanny Knight Knatchbull (the primary
real-life model, I’ve long asserted, for Emma Woodhouse) did in her
infamous truly vulgar letter to her sister a half century after JA’s death,
when she called her aunts Jane and Cassandra “vulgar”. Maybe by then Fanny
had finally realized that she had been skewered satirically as “Emma”, and
she was just a little peeved about that unflattering, all-too-revealing
portrait of her.


I’m puzzled, however, by why you made reference to “obscenity”. Where did
that come from? Neither I nor Liz Anne referred to “smut”. Are you
suggesting that a complex, poignant, veiled fictional depiction by JA of a
pregnancy outside wedlock would constitute “obscenity”? Maybe I've missed
your point.

I deliberately used that Anglo-Saxon term “smut” just then, because that
word “obscenity” sorta put me in remind (as JA might have put it) of its
being used by the final plenary speaker at the just concluded JASNA. He
vulgarly, inelegantly, and seemingly homophobically, used it in responding
during the q&a to an attendee's favorable mention of “Pride and
Prometheus”, an Austen mashup of P&P and Persuasion, in which, apparently,
the famous fossil hunter Mary Anning and Mary Bennet fall in love with each
other in Lyme. A number of us in the audience were not pleased to hear such
a sentiment expressed by someone who was given the privilege of addressing
700 attendees at the farewell luncheon.

Arnie