Read The Jane Austen Handbook Online
Authors: Margaret C. Sullivan
The Jane Austen Handbook (23 page)
Set:
A group of dancers in a country dance, as well as the dances that they perform together.
Shift:
A woman’s undergarment, constructed like a sack dress, intended to keep clothing cleaner by keeping them from direct contact with the skin.
Squire:
The principal landowner in a village; Mr. Bennet, Mr. Darcy, and Mr. Knightley all were the squires of their respective villages.
Special license:
A license that granted a couple dispensation from marrying before noon, in their parish church, and eliminating the need to publish the banns.
Spencer:
A short overcoat made like the bodice and sleeves of a gown.
Spinster:
A legal term for an unmarried woman; a trifle uncomplimentary when used in everyday speech.
Stagecoach:
A public conveyance in which one traveled in a large group, stopping at predetermined locations. Stays: A corset.
Surgeon:
A medical practitioner who could set bones and perform operations. Surgeons were not considered gentlemen and were not addressed as Doctor, but as Mister.
Syllabub:
Cream whipped with fruit juice; it could be drunk or eaten with a spoon.
Tambour:
A style of embroidery in which a fine hook was used to draw thread through fabric that was stretched over an embroidery hoop, resulting in what looked like a chain stitch. An ancestor of crocheting.
Ton, The:
Fashionable society.
Ton
without the article referred to polished manners; one was spoken of as having “good ton.”
Tithes:
A set percentage of income required to be paid to a parish clergyman or lay rector. This payment constituted a clergyman’s income along with profits from glebe land.
Vicar:
A clergyman entitled to collect a parish’s small tithes (10 percent of the profits from livestock and produce) or paid a salary by the rector.
Wafer:
A gummed label that became sticky when moistened on one side; used to seal letters.
I’m tremendously grateful for all the help and support I had while writing this book. First I must express my groveling Mr. Collins-like gratitude to Melissa Wagner for wrangling my rampant Janeite geekiness into useful and readable form. Thanks to my Janeite Posse for their information, input, assistance, and support: Laura Boyle, Lorna Carton, Teresa Fields, Cinthia García Soria, Lorraine Hanaway, Robin Hutchinson, Karen Lee, Elizabeth Steele, Allison Thompson, Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Diane Wilkes, and Jennifer Winski. Thanks to Jim McCarthy for taking care of business so I could just write. Thanks to the readers of AustenBlog for keeping me on my toes, and to all those who have read and commented on my Austen stories and essays over the years. Thanks to my family for the warm encouragement: Bill and Betty Sullivan, Rita and Dennis Kirkwood, Jerry Sullivan, and Megan and Billy Horan. Thanks to my coworkers for putting up with my sleep-deprived crankiness while writing this book and for not telling me to shut UP already about Jane Austen, or at least not as often as they should. Thanks to my Horatian friends, who always have my back, even though I’ve neglected them shamefully while working on this book. Thanks to Kevin Kosbab and everyone at Quirk for making the book, like Henry Tilney, perfect, or very near it. Thanks to Kathryn Rathke for the gorgeous illustrations and to Bryn Ashburn for making the book beautiful. And most importantly, thanks to Jane Austen, for writing the books that have brought me so much pleasure and inspiration and for reminding me that “an artist cannot do anything slovenly.”
Margaret C. Sullivan is the editrix of
AustenBlog.com
, which catalogs and comments upon the collision of Jane Austen with popular culture, and one of the creators of Molland’s (
www.mollands.net
), an archive and community Web site for Jane Austen readers. She is a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America and is a member of the board of JASNA’s Eastern Pennsylvania/Delaware Valley Region as well as the region’s webmaster. She works for an international law firm as their Web content coordinator and spends her nearly nonexistent free time attempting to convince the world that Henry Tilney is way cooler than that Darcy fellow. She lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia, which she wishes were much closer to Bath, and is a graduate of Penn State University. Her personal Web site can be found at
www.tilneysandtrapdoors.com
.
