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Persuasions #2, 1980 Page 26 At the Baltimore Meeting THE TRIAL OF MRS. JANE LEIGH PERROT by Sidney Ives In an amusing and provocative paper, which had the audience in an uproar, Sidney Ives related the Portsmouth scenes in Mansfield Park to the imprisonment of Jane Austen’s aunt. He suggested Miss Austen’s description of the Price household was based on her observation of the Ilchester County gaoler’s home where Mrs. Leigh Perrot was held for eight months awaiting trial on a charge of shop-lifting. Although finally acquitted, she was, according to evidence unearthed by Mr. Ives, a kleptomaniac who was more than once in trouble with the law. Mr. Ives further suggested her aunt’s scandal contributed to Miss Austen’s preoccupation in Mansfield Park with moral and social problems of good and evil, and to her portrayal of Mrs. Leigh Perrot – Aunt Gardiner in Pride and Prejudice – and as a “vicious sponge,” Mrs. Norris, in the later work. Similarly he saw JA’s sister-in-law, Eliza, as the original for Mary Crawford, “the vilest woman in English fiction.” Mr. Ives asserted that Miss Crawford’s joke about sodomy in the navy, unique in genteel fiction before the twentieth century, establishes Miss Austen’s unwavering judgment that she is irretrievably depraved. |
