In recognition of International Women’s Day this weekend, we are celebrating a landmark development in Oxford’s World’s Classics series – the first original academic introduction by a female scholar for a female writer. The scholar was Mary Lascelles and the writer was Jane Austen – the novel in question Mansfield Park (1929).
Mary Lascelles (1900-1995) was born in Grenada, moving to England when she was three. She was the granddaughter of Henry Lascalles, 4th Earl of Harewood and, as such, was the cousin of both the 6th Earl of Harewood, who married George V’s daughter Princess Mary, and Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, Private Secretary to four British monarchs. In 1919, she matriculated into Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford to study English and was one of the first generation of women at Oxford to be able to take their degrees directly at the end of their course – a generation younger than those pioneering women who in 1920 were finally allowed to receive the degrees to which they would have long been eligible were they men.
It was through one of these women, Katherine Chapman née Metcalf (1887-1978), a tutor of hers, that Lascelles became interested in Jane Austen. Katharine had published an edition of Pride and Prejudice in 1912 – a textually accurate edition featuring an introduction, an overview of Austen’s life and works, plus essays, criticisms, and textual notes. The following year she married Robert Chapman (1881-1960), Assistant and later Secretary to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, essentially OUP’s Chief Executive. It was under his influence that standard editions of modern novelists became part of the organisation’s stock in trade. Katharine’s interest in Austen clearly inspired Robert and together they planned to jointly produce an edited complete works.
War and marriage intervened, with Katharine quoted as saying she ‘had to give up my share in a job which we had planned together when the claims of children came first.’ Robert is credited with his own standard edition of Austen in 1923, featuring the novels Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Curiously though, Katharine had published her own version of Northanger Abbey a few months prior and the text of both that, and her 1912 Pride and Prejudice, were the basis for her husband’s edition, with no mention of her contribution.
Chapman’s edition is described by John Wiltshire as ‘giving Austen’s novels the editorial treatment up to this time reserved for the Greek and Latin canon’, confirming Austen’s ‘classic status’. Lascelles herself reminded us ‘it is easy to forget now what an innovation it was to handle the text of an English novelist with a solicitude hitherto reserved for the major poets’. As a project it was undoubtedly important, and its impact is undiminished. However, over the last twenty years, the role of Katherine has been demonstrated to have been vastly underestimated or even hidden. With her 1912 Pride and Prejudice, Janine Barchas argues, ‘it was Metcalfe’s edition that fully pulled Austen out of the doily-clad parlour and into the classrooms of textual scholarship’. Barchas’s essay, published in the Review of English Studies in 2017, and relying on extensive research in multiple Oxford archives including our own, points out how early the edition of Austen’s novels on textual principles had been proposed, and how late correspondence started to name R. W. Chapman as Editor.
So what of Mary Lascelles and Mansfield Park? The text of the novel in the 1923 edition, having been reprinted with minor emendations in 1926, was naturally the text that was used for the World’s Classics edition that was published in 1929 with Lascelles’ introduction. Evidence suggests that substantial work was done on the “Chapman” text of this novel during the war by Katherine, in Oxford, whilst Robert was serving in Greece. Efforts by Barchas to sew together a narrative present a convincing case for there being a complete edition of Mansfield Park, as edited by Katherine, ready to print when, in early 1918, conscription was extended to men up to the age of 51, leading the virtually silenced Press to abandon its production when electro plates had already started to be produced. Less than two years later, Chapman, back from the war and newly promoted into the top job at the Press, is now sole editor, having done little of the work that makes the edition so distinctive, authoritative, and groundbreaking.
