Favourite Austen analysis?

[Lona]

Any recommendations for Austen analysis/criticism? I really enjoyed John Mullan's What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved. And Tony Tanner's forewords in the Penguin editions of Jane Austen.

[Abigail]

I agree with you about What Matters in Jane Austen? An excellent study, pitched neither too high nor too low.

Am currently reading Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. I started it with a good deal of trepidation because a person I respect said it made her so mad she threw it across the room! But so far I agree with about 85 percent of it and think it’s a useful counter to “prevailing wisdom” about JA. (The author should never have been exposed to Freudian thought, and those moments when she lets her Freud flag fly are when I roll my eyes.)

Most of my reading of Austen crit was so many decades ago as not to be very useful. But I have enjoyed some of the popular books that focus on everyday life and society in her time, such as Roy and Lesley Adkins’s Jane Austen's England and Deirdre LeFaye’s Jane Austen's Country Life.

[Kirk]

I also agree about "What Matters...". I agree with Abigail about "Country Life". I recently reread that one for one of my bookclubs and went on to LeFaye's "Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels". The chapters of the novels are outstanding in my view. Certainly quotable! Although she "oversells" some her points, I also enjoyed Paula Byrne's "Life in Small Things". I admire John Wiltshire and his books.

@Abigail Hmmm...I'm sure I'll be in book throwing mode when I get to "Secret Radical". Lol...

[Lona]

I can't resist pointing you to John Mullan's review of the Secret Radical in the Guardian. He is pretty scathing.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

I'll check out LeFaye, thank you.

[Kirk]

Lona wrote: "I can't resist pointing you to John Mullan's review of the Secret Radical in the Guardian. He is pretty scathing.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201......"

Thank you for posting that. Mr Knightley is far and away my favorite Austen male....so major book throwing comments right there. And if she says anything negative about Marianne Dashwood or Jane Bennet....she may earn herself my first one star rating!!!!!

[Abigail]

Thanks for the link, Lona! I’ll go haring off to read Marilyn Butler now!

[Kirk]

Abigail wrote: "Thanks for the link, Lona! I’ll go haring off to read Marilyn Butler now!"

Enjoy?????? Lol, I'll never read her(did you read Jane's letters Marilyn Butler??? Just saying!!!) but highly enjoyed Claudia L Johnson's response. Oh to have Austen's response to both sides(I'm left of center but not an Austen radical) claiming far far too much.

[Abigail]

Yes, I gave Marilyn Butler’s crit a miss when I was reading for my undergrad thesis (the last time I was a serious Austen scholar), but now I feel I have to be fair to both sides of the argument. I’ve always believed Austen to be a bit of a radical, or at least someone who saw through society’s pieties, which is why I wrote my Elizabeth Bennet the way I did. My edition of the letters is an earlier one (sorry, it’s downstairs and I’m too lazy to go down and look up the editor), since I was doing my research in the 1970s.

[J.]

I think that two very good books that analyze Austen's literary technique are Mary Lascelles "Austen and Her Art" and R.W. Chapman's "Jane Austen: Facts and Problems."
For the moral theory underpinning the novels, I think one of the best is Peter J. Leithart's "Miniatures and Morals".

[Kirk]

I might try Chapman, thanks! Hmmm...I just read "Austen and Her Art" but it didn't work for me.

I seriously can't believe I didn't mention Carol Shields "Jane Austen: A Life". While more Bio than analysis, fine analysis there is.

[Abigail]

Peter Leithart’s book sounds really interesting! Thanks for the reference, J.

[Lona]

I recently came across this essay on "Mansfield Park." The opening absolutely grabbed me. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/s.... A very good Fanny apologia.

[Abigail]

What a great article that is, Lona! Truly lucid. Thanks for sharing it!

[Mrs]

Summer time and the livin is easy .too hot to go out and to lazy to clean house so I shall finally add my list of favourite books o n JA
The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen ED E Copeland
The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austenn/Janet Todd

Jane Austen in context ed Janet Todd
The Improvement of the Estate/
AM Duckworth
Fathers in Jane Ausren /I.P.Duckfield
What Matters in Jane Austen /J Mullan
Enjoy your summer

[victoria_tonks]

I loved Searching for Jane Austen by Emily Auerbach. Highly recommended.

[Nina]

Thanks for the list and reccomendation - some new ones to look at.
I've read Fathers in Austen, and What Matters in Austen - they were both really interesting.
Maggie Lane's books are good, I especially liked her Jane Austen and Food.

[Melindam]

I recommend A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen as a collection of essays on all her works and more.

[Alisa]

I enjoyed Tomalin's biography about Jane Austen and Le Faye's Jane Austen: A Country Life. Now I'm looking forward to read Paula Byrne's biography.

[Janet]

Please find below the review of Claire Tomalin's biography which I was asked to write several years ago -

Claire Tomalin. Jane Austen: a life. London: Viking, 1997

Reviewed by Jean Brushfield - my web site is www.janetaylmer.com

pen name: novelist Janet Aylmer, author of Darcy's Story



at the request of ASJAS (http://ssgfi.anglistikguide.de/cgi-bi...)

Jane Austen and her novels have been the subject of so much media attention during the past few years that any reviewer could be forgiven for feeling weary at the prospect of reading more about the author. In this context, Claire Tomalin has achieved the almost impossible, producing a book which offers fresh insights into the background and motivations of this most famous of English novelists.

Tomalin already has several well-regarded biographies to her credit, including those of Shelley, Nelly Ternan (mistress of Charles Dickens), and Mrs Jordan, mistress to the Prince Regent. The extent of her research for her latest book is handled lightly.

Although the family and their connections have been well documented elsewhere, Claire Tomalin takes a fresh approach in suggesting that there were consequences of Jane's circumstances, both as a child and as a young woman, which may have had a critical influence on her work.

The practice in the Austen family was to "farm out" the children, after their first few months of life until they were a year or two old, to wet nurses in the local village. Tomalin makes the plausible suggestion that this early separation from her mother and her home may explain the Interruption in Jane's creative inspiration for several years when she was forcibly moved away from her familiar surroundings in Steventon when her father retired to live in Bath.

The library at the Rectory at Steventon was as available to Jane as it was to the young boys who were tutored by her father and lived with the family, since Tomalin reminds us of the strong links between Austen's novels and the works of Dr Johnson. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that Jane wrote all her books from a feminine viewpoint, in view of her close acquaintance from an early age, as Tomalin explains, with her father's pupils and her own brothers.

At a talk by Claire Tomalin about her book that I attended on 31 October 1997 at the Theatre Royal in Bath (England), she said how aware she had been that she was seeking to retell the life of an author who was an "icon" to so many people. Tomalin said that Jane Austen remained, despite the known details of her life, a person who had not revealed her innermost thoughts in her writings, nor based much of her plots on situations known to her. Rather, she had had the skill to invent stories which portrayed aspects of the time during which she lived in ways which we still appreciate today.

In the book, the details of family life in the late 18th and early 19th centuries are brought vividly to the reader, as Tomalin skilfully documents Jane's progress from the young woman who nearly lost her heart to the handsome Irishman, Tom Lefroy, to the final years when she at last gained some recognition as a successful author. In a family where, like so many others at that time, women could not rely on surviving to see their children grow up, and were burdened with so many household duties whilst they lived, Tomalin suggests that Jane had good reason to view the married state with some scepticism. Certainly the early deaths of 4 of her sisters-in-law must have brought home to her the risks for women and particularly those which accompanied motherhood.

In a family where letters were constantly being despatched, news exchanged and visits made, Cassandra Austen's role in arranging the household so that Jane had time to write regularly has not always been so well recognised as in this book. Many of the Austen children followed their mother by trying their hand at writing, but his younger daughter's talents were clearly recognised by the Reverend Austen early in her life, when he sought to sell her first book to a publisher when she was barely out of her teens.

Tomalin highlights Jane's precocious talent in producing three very different books (Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility) by the time she was 23 - no "formula novelist" she! If there is any weakness in this biography, it is perhaps that the explanations of the plots of the novels might have been better put in appendices, rather than being introduced sometimes rather abruptly within the story of the author's life.

Jane Austen's family were relatively impoverished members of the middle class at a time when social position largely determined one's success in life. The stark contrast between the expectations of an able young man in the Austen family and one of his sisters (without any fortune to tempt an eligible suitor), is clearly set out in the book. In this sense, Jane's strength of mind in rejecting the proposal of the wonderfully named Harris Bigg-Wither was brave.
Whether someone as determined as Jane would have been prevented from writing by becoming Mrs Bigg-Wither, we can only speculate; but Claire Tomalin may well be right in assuming that we might not have the novels at all, or at least in the form that they were eventually published. We may also share her view that, carried by their author on so many journeys to visit relatives and friends during Jane's middle years, it is close to a miracle that the manuscripts of the books survived at all. The thought of the effort needed to draft and redraft a book like Pride and Prejudice by hand is indeed daunting to the modern author, indulged by the conveniences of the wordprocessor and the photocopier.

In evoking the realities of Jane Austen's life, Tomalin offers the reader a fresh and welcome insight into what prompted, formed, and finally brought to fruition one of the greatest literary talents in the English language.