Sarah Rose Kearns interview
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Janeite, must be able to study a character. Upon meeting me, Sarah, who prefers to go by her middle name of Rose, immediately asks me about myself and what I am studying. Janeites, and writers, like to people watch.
Rose graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Creative Writing. Her debut play, an adaptation of Persuasion, played at the Connelly theatre, after a delay due to the pandemic, in September 2021 to critical acclaim. Her next project was Manydown, Rose's interpretation, based on a true story, where Austen accepted the proposal of family friend Harris Bigg-Wither and subsequently refusal him the next morning. Rose utilizes her writing skills to imagine what took place that historic night that went onto determine the Regency authors life. Although the pandemic was difficult for people in the arts, Rose displayed her creative side as she adapted her second project to fit the challenging times. After Manydown was preformed at JASP (Jane Austen Summer Program) Rose, with the help of director Mia Moravis, adapted Manydown into a radio play which is now available on Audible.
On August 13th and 14th, Rose, and fellow Austen enthusiasts, hosted 'Open to Persuasion' 'An online mini-conference on Jane Austen's last completed novel' to benefit The Holy Theatre's Persuasion Workshop. You can find out all about the online festival at https://theholytheatre.betterworld.org where you can also donate to the Holy Theatre Persuasion Workshop.
With a writers ear, Rose listens with genuine interest to my answers to her questions, before I manage to turn the questions back to her. I ask Rose what she thinks first lit the spark of creativity in her, and can she remember her first piece of creative writing?
ROSE:
I wrote things in school as a child. I've been somebody who thought of myself
as a theatre person longer than I thought of myself as a writer. After high
school, I moved to New York and studied acting for a bit, and then decided to go
back and get my degree in Creative Writing. I thought about being an English major, but I ended up
majoring in creative writing just because those were the classes that I was
enjoying. I didn't study play-writing in school but after I finished, I still
wanted to do theatre and it seemed like a natural combination to try and bring
those things together as a playwright.
I wondered
does she feel her experience of acting gave her a greater understanding of writing
for the stage?
ROSE: Yes, I do. It has been a process, Persuasion is the first full length
play that I ever wrote, I completed the first draft almost six years ago. So,
it was a long time coming. We had
readings but in 2021 we were in rehearsals for the first full production. Which I was just so thankful, over the moon, so thrilled about. So, I learned a lot about play-writing as I was working on this particular project. Figuring out how to do
it, while doing it. It has given me a different kind of insight. Probably a lot
of actors, who write, get a sense of the rhythm of a scene that’s different from
somebody who doesn’t come to it from that way. One of my biggest takeaways, early on, was that I just didn’t need as many words as I thought I did. Of course, I’m very fond of Austen and I wanted to do justice to the book. My instinct was to just take all the dialogue from
the book and put it in the script, then write other dialogue to fill in the
gaps. I've learned that Austen is a fairly pithy writer, she’s not long-winded.
You only need one sentence to say it on stage, even if it’s three sentences of
dialogue in the book. Peoples sense of
time and attention span is different. Of course, there are nonverbal ques and people’s
lines. A lot of what I did with the piece, between the very first
draft, was just whittling away extra words, and trying to convey the point
as concisely as possible.
I asked Rose when
adapting Persuasion, what translated easily to the stage and what was the most
difficult aspect? What did she leave in and what did she omit?
ROSE: The
structure of the play was pretty close to the first draft. I hadn't really
figured out what scenes I wanted to include in the first draft, and i made
them shorter. I did a lot of studying, I read a lot of screenwriting books, and
story structure books, which I didn't study in college. Creative writing programs
are maybe a little too pretentious to do story theory, but it was actually very
useful. I figured out what I felt was the central outline or spine of the
plot and the movements that needed to be hit for the story to work, to
have an arc. I worked around that, and then I played around with figuring out
how I could do it with a reasonable number of characters. It's written for a
cast of ten with a lot of doubling up, but I did make some significant cuts that
may be of interest to some Janeites. I, unfortunately, had to cut the two
moments in the first volume of Persuasion where Wentworth comes and helps her
out, the scene with the children, and the scene with the carriage. Those are so
beautifully rendered in the novel, but I decided I didn't want to have either children or horses in the play. I hoped that some of the emotional
tension in those scenes, which we see narrated from Anne’s perspective in the
book, is provided by having actors’ bodies on stage and having eye contact, and that it can
replace the experience. So, as much as I wanted to be pure Austen, it is a very
different medium. Even if I had all the time in the world to tell a very long
tale, to do a very long play, things needed to be translated in a way. It's like
translating from one language to another, which is necessary, I am interpreting.
So, I didn't set out about with the idea that I wanted to rewrite Persuasion, I
was trying to capture what I perceived to be the important themes of the novel as a reader. That still meant changing things, I also cut out Mrs. Smith, she
is a controversial character. Some people think volume two of the novel, Austen
would have continued to revise if she hadn't been dying. She comes in and has a
monologue, this whole chapter to herself, how Mr Elliott is such a bad person,
it's a little clunky plot wise. She's an interesting figure but it doesn't feel
well written to me as a reader. Not that I presume to correct Jane Austen! It
doesn't feel essential to the plot, It seems to slow down the central thrust of
the story. I decided it wasn't absolutely necessary and created another little
moment, where you get the impression that Mr Elliott has multiple motives in
his pursuit of Anne. I don’t think him being a villain is essential to the main
plot of the story.
There are other adaptations that would make a completely different set of
choices. If you compare Persuasion to Emma, that has all the loose ends so
perfectly tied up and tight. That's the last one that Austen saw through the
press, while she was still alive. Every word is in the right place. I really
love Emma; I think Persuasion is my favorite, but I agree with people who say
Emma is the masterpiece. In Persuasion, there's this whole subplot with Mr
Elliott and Mrs Clay which doesn't make a lot of sense, of course we know that
she wrote a draft ending that she didn't like, and she corrected it a week
later. On the other hand, she did say, in the summer of 1816, after she
finished her complete draft of Persuasion, a year before she died, she said
in a letter to Fanny Knight ‘I have something ready for publication’ which I
presume could only, and some scholars argue, mean that she might have changed Persuasion. On the other hand, she was ill before she died, maybe she was trying
to get it out, and we don't know why she did not pursue publication for Persuasion
within that year. Typically, it seems that she let her work rest a little bit
after finishing the first draft, so, it's unclear.
As a fellow
Janeite, I wanted to know, when did she first 'meet' Jane and what got her hooked?
ROSE: It was Persuasion actually, I know many people had the experience of coming to Persuasion, and falling in love with Persuasion, as older readers, I actually didn't. I read Pride and Prejudice first, I think I was about 11 or 12 when I read those two. I was just a big reader and as a child, it was all over my head to some degree. I slogged through it. I wasn't an absolute pleasure, then I was thirteen or fourteen, I picked up Persuasion and that was the one that really imprinted on me, that was my book. I identified with Anne, not that I share her life circumstances particularly, but I was fond of her and she's been a good imaginary friend.
So, would she say Anne is the character she most identifies with of all Austen characters?
ROSE: I wouldn't presume to say I'm as cool as
Anne, but I'm really fond of her and she's the one that I identified with most
as a young reader. I admire her way of navigating her way through situations, especially in the first half
of the story. She really doesn't have a lot of external validation from anybody
in her life. She doesn't come into the spotlight. She doesn't have many lines
in act one, yet she still seems to have self-respect, I find this admirable,
she's not stupid. She manages not to be judgmental to other people. She looks
at the Musgrove girls and she says, ‘The're nice girls and they have their way,
I'm nice, I have my way, I'm happy to be me. I wish I had a sister that I was
this close to but I'm not trying to be a silly young girl’.
Fanny Prince and Anne are often considered to be judgmental characters, as a fan of Anne, what does Rose think of Fanny Price?
ROSE: I think Fanny Price has
a much worse situation. While Anne Elliot is certainly the Cinderella of her
family, the Elliot's are less dysfunctional. She doesn't have Aunt Norris's and
she obviously is the official daughter of the house, Anne's not the poor
relation. Anne hasn't suffered trauma and abuse as Fanny price has. Plus, Anne's
almost 10 years older, so, maybe, she was like Fanny price when she was younger.
I ask does Rose think Fanny Price is a much maligned
character? She does not seem to evoke the affection of other Austen heroines, Mansfield Park is often cited as fans least favorite novel. What are her views on Mansfield
Park and Fanny Price?
ROSE: She's a
fascinating character, I like Mansfield Park. I don't have a full
unified theory of it as a work of art. She is certainly the most likable person in the book. As a character study it feels very real, you know Fanny.
Some families, including their neurosis, feel quite authentic to me as a
reader.
The relevant themes of Mansfield Park of class, and particularly the issue of the East India Company, are prevalent as readers debate the place of Jane
Austen's fiction and in particular Mansfield Park. Rose, again the eternally curious
Janeite, is keen to know what I think? I reply that my opinion has always been
that the fact that Thomas Bertram is portrayed in such a bad light may be a subtle hint
as to Austen’s covert opinion.
ROSE: I quite agree with you. I'm sort of disturbed by the fact that Fanny is reconciled with him in the end. I guess that’s the thing about Mansfield Park, it is just a heavy novel. It does feel so critical of the Society, but then the last couple of chapters, it just all gets swept away under the rug.
So, does Rose think Austen was trying to
appease the audience?
ROSE: I agree, all those things, and also it's difficult to
conceive if let's say I'm Jane Austen, and I'm trying to come up with a happy
ending for this poor girl, what better fate is there for her? She doesn't have
a better option than marrying Edmund and staying with his family. She's tried
being out in the world in the Portsmouth section, she obviously does not want
to go. This is a world, as we see throughout the course of the novel, the white, supremacist, patriarchal structure, dominates everything. In the end, she doesn't
escape, she gets a little bit more of a comfortable seat. So, I guess it's
uncomfortable as a reader, but it's probably also realistic, we know that Austen
was quite interested in social realism. That's what Walter Scott called out in
his review of Emma at the time, she was seen as really experimenting with a
naturalistic style of writing that other authors had not explored so much.
Again Rose looks to me eager for my opinion, I reply that
I feel that i suppose in those times, like Shakespeare, Austen was limited as to how much she
can say overtly and remain popular. Therefore, through characters like Thomas Bertram, she takes us by the hand and leads us to subtle hints and guides us as to how we should think.
ROSE: I tend to agree with you certainly. It's interesting that people have so many different views that we can project ourselves. People have so many different ideologies, and different cultures, throughout time and space. People see themselves in Jane Austen, she is somehow a very inviting writer for the reader to connect with. I don't know exactly what it is about her world, it's not universal that everyone in the world loves Jane Austen, but a lot of people do. A lot of very different people love Jane Austen.
Again, Rose is interested to find out why I think Austen still remains so popular?
I answer that i think that is because she writes about human nature and that this is something that does
not change.
ROSE: A friend of mine is the author of Unmarriageable, which is a contemporary retelling of Pride and Prejudice. It takes place in Pakistan, her name is Soniah Kamal and she's my colleague on the JASNA (The Jane Austen Society of North America) equality diversity inclusion committee. I've heard her speak about how she grew up in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and how much she identified with Jane Austin's characters because Austen’s stories exist in a larger world, but they are primarily focused on interpersonal relationships and those really can translate to many different worlds. Family dynamics, and romantic relationships etc, these things are fairly universal.
I ask Rose what would she say were the differences between Persuasion and other Austen novels and how did these differences impact her writing?
ROSE: Persuasion is not a long novel, it has relatively few
major events and characters for Austen, or a 19th century novel, I did cut
some things that I had mixed feelings about. One thing that is interesting about Persuasion specifically, is that it has relatively little dialogue. I heard some
lecture say that they analysed it, and it has proportionally the least
percentage of words, or dialogue, of any of Austen novels, which makes sense. Persuasion has very much narrated thoughts and consciousness, and of course the two main
characters hate being in a room together. It is not like Pride and Prejudice
where they hate it, but they talk about how much they hate it. Pride and Prejudice adapts well for many reasons, It's delightful, but also it has great
dialogue between the two central characters and Persuasion has very little of
that, until the end. So that was interesting, thinking all about how to build
without words, or without having access to a lot of words. I had to figure out how to lead the audience, to track what Anne was feeling, to be invested in this
relationship, and to have a sense of the tension, even when it's unspoken.
That's been an interesting challenge, it's been something I've been through
throughout all the stage readings and workshops. This draft, over the last few
years, has become more fully explored now that we've done a full production.
My director was very innovative and had staging ideas, I had so much fun
working on it! Some of the strategies that I used to try and create that sense
of identification, and investment, which you need from a protagonist In a work of
dramatic literature, which is done in a completely different way in the novel.
It is told from Anne’s perspective, but actually she's very passive. So, I added
flashback scenes, and I did a lot with music. It's not a musical, but there's
music from the period that people sing, or play to each other, that I think
mysteriously taps into what's going on with her. I've tried to think of none linear ways of getting that, It is an interesting challenge for the story in
particular.
I wondered which Rose found the most challenging, adapting
Austen’s work, or venturing into her life in Manydown?
ROSE: Well, that's a good question, Manydown is a
short play. The experiences were quite different. I don't know I would say
either is more challenging, by the time I wrote Manydown I had completed
Persuasion. I was a more experienced playwright. The concerns are
different, I was interested in Manydown, and trying to come up with
something that is more realistic, and I'm making interpretive choices, but it's
not at odds with anything, or any known history, that we have, however, it required a
lot of research. I suppose one difference is that with Persuasion the
main reference text was a novel, whereas for Manydown I read more books.
It was a pretty smooth experience writing the first draft, Manydown
was pretty much like it is now, it hasn't gone through a lot of revision.
With that in mind, what advice would Rose give to writers, particularly
those tackling adaptations?
ROSE: That's a
good question, I think it's interesting and worthwhile to be aware of what your
goals are as an adapter. I'm not a person that says adaptations have to be very
faithful, faithfulness is a fraught term in adaptation studies. I don't think
it has to be faithful, but I think it has to be coherent. The film adaptations
of Austen that I've seen, that I feel don't look too well, are ones where they
leave something, they change one thing, but then they leave something else the
same. So it's like you give a character a new personality, but make them get in
the same way they do in the original text, how do you justify that? For
example I'm doing the same Fanny Price stick but I'm doing it in a sassy manner!
I'm concerned about internal coherence for the adaptation, figuring out how one
thing affects another.
What issues does Rose think Austen would tackle in society today?
ROSE: Well, that's an interesting question, I imagine that
she wrote about assertive, embellishing pictures of the life experiences that
she had. People who were class wise similar to herself, or to those she studied,
as a woman, she focused her stories almost entirely through women. So, I
imagine she would stick with that. Whatever her life experience was in the 21st
century world, it would be based on that. Of course, she would have possibility
had a much wider experience. Austen, as far as we know, never left Great
Britain, she may have gone to Wales, but we only know for sure that she was in
England. So, I suppose that would alter ones perspective, ones sense of
possibility. I think the kind of detailed realism is the heart of what I
perceived to have been her project as an artist. Now we tend to see her as a
romantic artist, especially people who come to it through movie adaptations,
and of course there is that too, then we see Austin as representing principal
history, like the past. There is this old timeline, and also this great love and
so forth, and I think she would be very surprised by the interpretation of her
work. That type of fiction did exist. It was Ann Radcliffe who wrote that type
of fiction, that specific, that was not what she was interested in doing. She
explicitly said’ I couldn't write a romance to save my life’. A friend of mine,
who is also a playwright, and was in the cast
of my production, has a wonderful play called
Lyme Park. It is a loose retelling of Northanger Abbey where she has a modern
day girls love of Jane Austen which tracks with Catherine's love of the Gothic. She has to let go of her ideas that everything is going to be like a
Jane Austen novel, In the way that Catherine has to let go of everything is
going to be like a Gothic adventure story, and it's just really clever. It
works so well as a satire of modern Janeite culture, but also a homage, it's
really highly recommended!
I agree with Rose, I think Austen would feel surprised about some peoples perception of her work as romantic fiction.
ROSE: Wouldn't Jane
Austen be stunned to think that that's how we read her?! It’s not necessarily
bad, I don't want to police people's enjoyment of her works, they are appealing
on a lot of different levels and you can take whatever you want from her. It's
not like I don't enjoy it, I picked up Persuasion which is obviously the most
sexy, romantic one, however, I think she'd be amused.
As a writer well versed in all things Austen, I wanted to
know If Rose had adapted Sanditon, where would she have taken the
story?
ROSE: I've thought about that. I haven't seen the TV series yet. I watched the first episode at an event, and I haven't made time to catch up. I know they've released a second series now. I think what's interesting about Sanditon, the fragment that we have, is that it doesn't necessarily seem like it's going to be a marriage plot. Obviously, we don't ever meet Sidney, who some people think is supposed to be the hero, from the thing’s others say, he could be a jerk. It's not clear, and she's probably not going to end up with Arthur or Sir Edward Denham either. In the novels we have, the heroine who always ends up with the first eligible male character to appear on stage, so to speak. If that's the case, that would be Edward Denham, but it's clearly not going to happen. She has a strong interest in Clara, that's the person she kind of fixates on and is interested in thinking about. Then of course this Miss Lambe is potentially a really interesting character. I think I would be interested in thinking about setting something in this Austen world, but that has a different structure, and this may be about these female friendships. Somebody suggested at a book club, that it seems like the setup to a murder mystery, like the Agatha Christie version of that.
If Austen were writing today, where does Rose think she would be placed on the bookshelves?
ROSE: We don't
know, that’s an interesting question, I suppose one possibility is that she
would have been dismissed as what they call 'chick lit', which is a rather
misogynistic term. Women writers, however innovative, often do get
slotted into a patriarchal niche in the marketplace, which implies that they are
interchangeable or not artistically interesting. That's the main thing about
her work, that it seems to me, to be so rigorously, intellectually stimulating,
funny, and so emotionally satisfying. It just has these different facets, and
she nails them all. So, I mean it really could be in the eye of the beholder
what she belongs in.
What Austen quote does Rose use to inspire or comfort her?
ROSE: That's a good question, one from her letters, I
actually have a friend, who is also a writer, who has it hanging above her desk
‘I'm not in the humor for writing, I must write on until I am’. I tend to
quote that; I don't know why, but it seems to come up a lot!
Another lovely one is ‘”My idea of good company, Mr Elliot,
is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of
conversation; that is what I call good company” ”’You are mistaken, said he
gently, “that is not good company; that is the best”’ That’s a Janeite password for being
interesting!
ROSE: The Jane Austen Society of
North America, has a program they do in collaboration with the Jane
Austen society in the UK, called the international visitor program. So, I
procured a grant from JASNA to go and spend a month in Chawton, and intern at
the Austen sites there, and do research for another play. I was awarded that
grant for the year 2020. It was postponed due to the pandemic i was finally able to visit in July. The plan is I'm actually interested in
writing another full-length play about the Austen family, along the lines of Manydown,
but longer and more characters, about Chawton and falling in different
moments in their lives.
Rose recently returned from England and never one to stand still, Rose organized the virtual mini festival 'Open to Persuasion' on Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th August, having attended, i can tell you they held a series of fascinating talks and discussions by Austen experts. Proceeds went to The Holy Theatre Persuasion Workshop Fund.
So, as Rose continues to search for lost secrets as she follows in the footsteps of Miss Austen, i know that wherever that path leads, Janeites can be persuaded to follow.
- Sarah Rose Kearns Persuasion can be seen on September 3rd and 4th at 2 P.M at 46 Bowen Road, Warwick, New York.
- Manydown is available to purchase on Audible.
- Rose has just revealed that The Holy Theatre will be co-producing a full production of Persuasion in the Spring. You can keep up to date on this and other news at:
- https://www.theholytheatre.org/
