By Stuart Mitchner
I could not seriously sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.
—Jane Austen
Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” set the course for last week’s column; this week’s throw landed on April 1, with its perennial “What fools these mortals be” subtext.
On the first day of April 1816, Jane Austen was writing to the secretary of the Prince Regent (later King George IV), who had passed along the royal suggestion that she make her next book “an historical romance.” The previous October, around the time she’d finished Emma, Austen been told that the Prince Regent “would not object” if she dedicated the book to him — “the royal equivalent of an offer you can’t refuse,” according to a story in the July 24, 2018 online New York Times. Austen’s forced tribute inspired one scholar to call it “one of the worst sentences she ever committed to print.”
The life-or-death wording of her All Fool’s Day letter, as recorded in A Book of Days for the Literary Year, hints at a back story worth exploring: “I could not seriously sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.” Struck by the way she raises the stakes at the end in case her stress on serious and seriously failed to make the point, I consulted Austen’s Letters (Oxford 1932/2011), where her exchange with the secretary, James Clarke, is reprinted in full.
As it happens, what was actually being “suggested” was that an “historical romance, illustrative of the history of the august House of Cobourg, would just now be very interesting.” According to the Times, in addition to scandalizing the nation “with his gluttony, profligacy, and infidelities,” the Prince Regent “had spent so extravagantly, and entertained such a long string of mistresses,” that “an early biographer accused him of contributing more to the demoralization of society than any prince recorded in the pages of history.” In view of this august subject, you can see why Austen went beyond the sentence quoted in the Book of Days: “I could no more write a romance than an epic poem …. and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter” (my italics).
On April Fool’s Day 2026, it’s good to find Austen sounding so up front, in the Prince Regent’s face with a touch of gallows humor, at the same time simply, sweetly, confiding to Mr. Clarke what her fiction means to her (“I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way”). I think even Mark Twain would applaud her boldness, he who once confessed that every time he read her most famous novel he wanted “to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Whether or not the author of Pride and Prejudice would have appreciated the free-swinging comic sensibility behind the remark, her free-swinging “I should be hung” reminds me of Twain’s advisory to readers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that anyone looking for motive, plot, or moral will be “prosecuted, banished, or shot.”
Ironies Abound
Jennifer Schuessler’s Times article (“Jane Austen’s First Buyer? Probably a Prince She Hated”) refers to an “irony that Austen herself might have appreciated,” the fact that the man she’d have “counted among her most reviled readers might also have been one of her very first.” The discovery was made in July 2018 when a graduate student working in the Royal Archives “came across a previously unknown bill of sale from a London bookseller, charging the Prince Regent 15 shillings” for a copy of Austen’s first published novel Sense and Sensibility, “making it what scholars believe to be the first documented sale of an Austen book.” The Prince Regent’s other purchases on that occasion included Monk’s Daughter, Capricious Mother and Sicilian Mysteries.
On the Money
In spite of the American president’s intention to literally make his mark on the national currency with his skyscraper signature, the fact that this column began taking shape during last Saturday’s No Kings Day rally is purely coincidental. At the time I didn’t know that Jane Austen’s April 1 message revolved around the royal overreaching of the Prince Regent; nor had I heard about the Bank of England’s recent announcement that her face was being removed from the £10 note, which she’d shared for the past decade with Queen Elizabeth and King Charles. Around the time she replaced Charles Darwin on the back of the tenner, there were those who violently disapproved, targeting bloggers who lobbied for Jane with threats of bombing, burning, pistol-whipping, and rape.
Other Birthdays
Aside from the Jane Austen entry, the only other one from the Book of Days worth noting is April 1, 1934, when Adolph Hitler was imprisoned for his part in the Beer-Hall Putsch and began to write Mein Kampf, whose original title — Four-and-a-half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice; Settling Accounts with the Destroyers of the National Socialist Movement — led one “wag” to comment: “Everyone needs an editor.”
As for notable celebrities born on the first of April, it’s a typically unlikely group, including the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873), who died in Beverly Hills; Edgar Wallace (1875), co-author of the script for the original King Kong; Lon Chaney (1883), who terrified audiences in The Phantom of the Opera; Wallace Beery (1885), who made 250 films and won a Best Actor Oscar for The Champ; and Toshiro Mifune (1920), star of Rashomon and Seven Samurai. I could mention Debbie Reynolds (1932) and Rachel Maddow (1973), but the one name that appealed to my Nabokovian concept of April Foolishness is the B-actor Jonathan Haze (1929), possibly a second cousin of Dolly Haze (alias Lolita). Best known for his work in Roger Corman films like the cult classic, Little Shop of Horrors, in which he played florist’s assistant Seymour Krelboined, Haze was working at a gas station when he was discovered by director Wyott Ordung, who gave him a small part in Monster from the Ocean Floor.
Jonathan Haze gets a brief mention in my copy of Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers (McFarland 1988) that includes a conversation with my father-in-law Herbert Strock, director of Riders To the Stars, How To Make a Monster, Gog, and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. Herb’s chapter begins with this quote: “I remember when I was doing these pictures, my kids were ashamed of me, they felt I was pandering. I said, ‘Look, we’ve got to eat — they’re fun to do and I don’t mind.’ Now they’re clamoring for me to collect the posters from those films….”
Austen and America
When Jane Austen (1775-1817) wrote that All Fool’s Day letter, she had less than a year to live. My sense is that she would be both amazed and appalled by the idea that two centuries later her face would be on the £10 note. And what would she think of the tidal wave of books flooding the market on the occasion of her 250th birthday, which very nearly coincided with the 250th birthday of the United States?
The list on regency-explorer.net/jane 250 numbers well over 100 books, including many in other languages.
A small sample from the list, minus authors and publishers, includes A Jane Austen Year: Celebrating 250 years of Jane Austen; Jane Austen and George Eliot: The Lady and The Radical; Jane Austen in 41 Objects; If Jane Austen Spoke the Language of Gen Z: Pride and Prejudice in the Present Day; Nonbinary Jane Austen; Go Ask Austen: Life Lessons from Jane Austen; Pride and Prejudice Puzzle Book; The Jane Austen Insult Guide for Well-Bred Women: Serving Tea with a Side Of Scorn; Six Weeks by the Sea: The Summer Jane Austen Fell in Love; The Complete Jane Austen Movie Guide; and Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane.