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George Henry Lewes, a prominent English philosopher and literary critic of the 19th century, expressed his views on Jane Austen in his book “The Principles of Success in Literature,” published in 1865. In this work, Lewes praised Austen’s literary skills and recognized her contribution to the novel genre. He described her as a “perfect artist” and admired her ability to capture the nuances of human nature and social interactions.
Lewes appreciated Austen’s keen observation, wit, and subtle humor in depicting the manners and customs of the English gentry. He admired her characterizations, noting that she presented her characters in a vivid and realistic manner. He also commended her for creating engaging plots and maintaining a sense of tension and interest throughout her novels.
However, despite his overall admiration for Austen’s writing, Lewes also criticized her works for being limited in scope and lacking in broader social and political commentary. He considered her focus on domestic situations and the restricted world of the English gentry as a limitation of her work.
In summary, Lewes praised Jane Austen as a skilled and perceptive writer, appreciating her artistry and ability to capture the intricacies of human behavior. However, he also acknowledged certain limitations in her subject matter and the broader social themes explored in her novels.
Q: Who critiqued Jane Austen’s writings in the 1800s?
In the 1800s, Jane Austen’s writings received a mix of reviews and critiques from various individuals. Here are a few notable figures who critiqued her works during that time:
-Sir Walter Scott: A renowned Scottish novelist and poet, Sir Walter Scott wrote a review of Austen’s novel “Emma” in 1815. While he acknowledged her talent, he also expressed some reservations about her writing style.
-Richard Whately: An Anglican theologian and philosopher, Richard Whately reviewed Austen’s novel “Mansfield Park” in 1816. His critique focused on moral aspects of the story, expressing concerns about the characters’ behavior.
-Margaret Oliphant: A Scottish novelist and literary critic, Margaret Oliphant wrote about Austen’s novels in the mid-1800s. She recognized Austen’s skills in portraying human nature and social situations but criticized her limited range of subjects and settings.
-Charlotte Brontë: The author of “Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Brontë expressed mixed opinions about Austen’s works. In a preface to the second edition of “Wuthering Heights” in 1850, she praised Austen’s talent but criticized the lack of passion and heightening of emotions in her novels.
-Henry James: An American writer and critic, Henry James evaluated Austen’s novels in the late 19th century. He appreciated her keen observation of human behavior but noted a lack of imaginative depth in her works.
https://jasnanorthcarolina.org/discus...
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By Shannon Chamberlain
In her fiction, the 18th-century novelist wrestled with the same question that preoccupied Adam Smith: Does the pursuit of wealth diminish a person's moral integrity?
When Jane Austen died in 1817, her reinvention began. Her brother Henry Austen published, as the preface to the posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, a biographical note that praised her modesty and her financial disinterestedness. According to Henry, Jane accounted herself astonished when her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, made her £150. “Few so gifted were so truly unpretending,” Henry tells us. “She regarded the above sum as a prodigious recompense for that which cost her nothing.”
It is in every way a deeply felt, generous obituary, but the self-effacing, even “faultless” Jane character it imagines has more in common with Emma Woodhouse’s altogether-too-perfect bugbear Jane Fairfax than it does with the author who complained in a letter to a friend that she would have really preferred a bigger advance than the £110 she received for Pride and Prejudice.
It’s no great secret that Austen’s novels are fascinated with the microeconomics of the “three or four families in a country village” that she made her lifelong theme. These days, however, we tend to slap Twilight-style romance covers on them and try to forget that her most charming heroines are actually fortune hunters.
I will pause for a moment as a thousand Janeites around the world cry out in unison. But to resume: The likeable and impecunious Bennet girls, the disinherited Dashwood daughters, and even gentle Anne Elliott are by any standard, contemporary or Georgian, truffling for funds. This was the occupation of a gentleman’s daughter in the late 18th century.
Austen, too, was a fortune hunter, after a fashion. Like any author, she wrote for many reasons—personal artistic expression, to entertain herself and her beloved sister Cassandra, to comment on the world around her in the guise of mere stories—but also for money. She made efforts to get herself a publisher, and did.
As brother Henry’s whitewashing suggests, this was not an uncontroversial activity, especially for a gentleman’s daughter. When Jane Austen was born in 1775, the Industrial Revolution was in the first blush of youth and the pursuit of commercial self-interest—at least partially normalized now—was still regarded with the suspicious eye of centuries’ worth of Christian paeans to poverty and aristocratic snobbery about trade, finance, and any form of non-inherited wealth.
* * *
Austen was a year old when the modern science of economics was invented. Adam Smith, Jane’s neighbor to the north in Scotland, published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, commonly known today by its pithier final four words. Its most famous line is the rallying banner for free marketeers even in 2014, a winning defense of the power and driving force of the very commercial self-interest that the established churches of Europe derided: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their self interest.”
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If any Smith book was likely to have sat on an Austenian side table, it wasn’t The Wealth of Nations but The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
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Austen—the highly literate daughter of a highly educated parson, well read in that polymath way that seems impossible to us now—probably did not attempt the slog through the two-volume treatise of political economy, or at least no good evidence that she did exists. But Smith’s work was at the cutting edge of liberal opinion, and permeated the culture around it, as much as any bestselling book today. For example, one of the volumes in the Austen family library was Thomas Percival’s A Father’s Instructions: Moral Tales, Fables, and Reflections, a children’s commonplace anthology that proselytized for the new sciences and moral thought of the Enlightenment. A footnote in the reissued 1781 edition points Percival’s younger readers to Smith’s description of the process of making a pin in The Wealth of Nations, the famous demonstration of the division of labor at work. (Yes, indeed: children’s books came with footnotes back then.) Peter Knox-Shaw points out that Catherine Morland’s recitation of the Beggar’s Petition in Northanger Abbey repeats, letter-perfect, the errors that Percival introduced when he reprinted it.
But if any Smith book was likely to have sat on an Austenian side table, it wasn’t The Wealth of Nations, but the work that Smith himself considered foundational, and thus revised a staggering six times over the course of his lifetime, up until the year of his death. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) introduced Smith’s concept of sympathy. This was a word used slightly differently in Smith’s time than in our own, and doesn’t have much to do with the modern tendency to click like on a Facebook friend’s engagement announcement to show our support, or to feel terrible about the plight of child soldiers. It referred instead to the mortar of civilized society, the way that we modify our behavior as we come to an understanding of how others see us and realize that they cannot regard our problems in the same close and passionate way that we do.
Smith, who sought to reconcile a kind of genial 18th-century deism with the precepts of the established Churches of Scotland and England, summarized the matter thus: “As to love our neighbor as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbor, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbor is capable of loving us.” We might, if we listen closely, hear a slight echo in bookish Mr. Bennet’s philosophy: “For what do we live for but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”
But for all of the strides Smith made toward reconciliation, he never quite came to a conclusion about whether a rich man could get into heaven, or even be happy on earth. The ambiguity is more apparent in The Theory of Moral Sentiments than it is in The Wealth of Nations; the latter makes the operation of the invisible hand its subject, but the former inquires about its origins.
Smith turns out to be less than enamored with those origins. In one of the many cases where “sympathy”—so connotatively positive now—is as dangerous as it is necessary, Smith tells us that it is our imaginative sympathies, our way of picturing how much fun it would be to be rich, that do in fact create the wealthy, bustling world around us, but which may deform our moral characters and even our ability to be happy in the process.
Few realize it now, but the first appearance of the invisible hand in Smith’s work occurs in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, not The Wealth of Nations. And that forgetting is part of a radical revision of the way that we tend to regard greed in the modern era.
Greed, for us utilitarian moderns, is dangerous because it prioritizes the individual over the society, accruing benefits to a small number of people at the expense of larger groups. Smith’s concern about wealth and virtue is diametrically opposite. The acquisition of wealth does little good for the individual, but much good for the world around her. To demonstrate, he gives us the parable of the poor man’s son, “whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition,” a man who imagines that it would be a very good thing to have some servants to labor for him, so thus labors his entire life to get some servants, in one of the finest 18th-century examples of economic irony.
This story is a tragedy. “Through the whole of his life [the poor man’s son] pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repos which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquility that is at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it.”
Smith doesn’t begin to sound like we think Smith should until the next paragraph, when the worm finally turns. “It is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner,” he says, because it is only our self-delusion that it is better to be rich that “rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.” This deception farms the fields, builds the cities, creates the surplus that enables the existence of art and literature, something higher than the hardscrabble for mere existence.
And it is does not simply accrue to the people who falsely believe that they will be happier once they are richer. “The rich,” Smith points out, “only select from the heap what is most precious. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity…they are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants.” The rich, in getting rich, hurt themselves and help others, individual salvation be (literally) damned.
We can quibble with the truth of this formulation, but there is no doubting that it represented the best of liberal, au courant thought in Austen’s young adulthood. And it is this argument about the relationship between wealth and virtue—the regrettable way that we seek what we already had to begin with, to our great mental and moral harm—that manifests itself particularly in Sense and Sensibility.
* * *
One of the problems of any adaptation that moves Sense and Sensibility forward in time is Marianne Dashwood’s illness. Germ theory tends to get in the way of the story here; young ladies do not get a fever because their hearts are broken by cads, generally speaking. And then there’s the problem of what this episode is even doing for the plot, other than to allow Colonel Brandon to go fetch Mrs. Dashwood as a sign of his devotion: an anomalous contrivance in an author who Walter Scott commends for a “truth in painting” the scenes of ordinary life. Marianne’s sudden fever makes perfect sense, however, when we see it in the light of Smith’s ambiguities about the acquisition of wealth and its impact on personal happiness.
To understand it, we must go back to a certain financial equation set up earlier in the text, in the middle of a seemingly innocuous conversation between the Dashwoods and Edward Ferrars. Edward is a rich man’s son visited with no ambition whatsoever, whose “wishes are all moderate.”
Marianne, the Henry Austen of the moment, takes great offense when her sister Elinor points out that fame of the kind that Edward’s family seeks for him might have little to do with happiness. Wealth, on the other hand, is always useful. “For shame!” scolds Marianne.
***
Elizabeth Bennet occasionally declares that she won’t simply marry for the sake of keeping Mrs. Bennet off a cat food diet in her senior citizenhood. (Who would?)
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But it turns out that Elinor’s idea of “wealth” differs substantially from her sister’s. When Elinor asks Marianne what her idea of a subsistence-level “competence” is, it turns out that it is nearly double what Elinor would consider gross wealth. “And yet two thousand a year is a very moderate income,” she says. “A family cannot well be attained on a smaller. I am sure I am not extravagant in my demands. A proper establishment of servants, a carriage, perhaps two, and hunters, cannot be supported on less.”
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By Shannon Chamberlain
Two thousand pounds a year in late-18th-century Britain was a substantial sum, enough to place a family in what we would now call the one percent. But the real joke of the scene is that Marianne’s pretense to abstract reasoning about the moderate amount of wealth that will make her happy is highly imaginatively specific. The word “hunters” is the clue. She isn’t theorizing about what will make her happy; she’s imagining her establishment with her love interest, John Willoughby, once they are married. Willloughby is a consummate hunter, and when Edward points out that hunters are a bit of a luxury and not everyone hunts, Marianne “colours” and replies that “most people do.”
Marianne, alas, does not get her hunters. This is one of the ways in which Sense and Sensibility differs from Pride and Prejudice. Jane and Elizabeth Bennet don’t really compromise in their happily ever afters. They don’t have to trade wealth for happiness, despite Elizabeth’s occasional pert speech to Charlotte Lucas that she won’t simply marry anyone for the sake of keeping Mrs. Bennet off a cat food diet in her senior citizenhood. (Who would?) These little tirades preserve our affection for Elizabeth, although the fact that she doesn’t have to follow through on these severe principles is what we tend to forget. But Marianne Dashwood’s attempt to unite fortune and the happiness of a dashing young suitor fail miserably.
Ironically, Marianne does get her two thousand a year. The very sum that she thought necessary to support her gentility is in fact what Colonel Brandon, whom she marries at the end of the novel, brings to the table. The toils and labors she undertakes in the meantime are comparable to those of the poor man’s son in Smith’s parable. When Willoughby jilts her, the feminine art of writing letters of love and reproach to her erstwhile suitor is intensely time-consuming and energy-sapping. Marianne is up “before the house-maid had lit their fire next day,…kneeling against one of the window-seats for the sake of all the little light she could command,….and writing as fast as a continual flow of tears would permit her.” She is at her desk as hard as any bank clerk scrabbling after a fortune in a London counting house, and reading the winds and weather to figure out whether her lover’s lack of an answer has to do with his hunting.
Marianne, at least according to the precepts of the dismal science, has sacrificed the real tranquility that was at all times in her power. Of course, a strictly numerical analysis ignores that she believed herself in love with Willoughby and not with Brandon. The novel gradually reveals the worth of Brandon and the worthlessness of Willoughby, which makes the math even clearer. Arguably, the 18th-century reader would have recognized Willoughby for the shallow playboy he is sooner than Marianne ever did. Samuel Richardson’s Lovelace and a pantheon of earlier smooth-talking men with hunters and sweet promises under their mustaches prepared them for the type.
As for Marianne’s mysterious late-in-the-game illness, it also contains curious echoes of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith never can decide how one should feel about the pursuit of wealth. On the one hand, it keeps in motion the industry of mankind. On the other, it doesn’t make people very happy. So how is the individual character—after all, the subject of a treatise on ethical conduct—to treat wealth?
Smith resolves not to resolve on anything. He encourages his readers to take a “complex” view of wealth. While nature imposes on our sympathies and senses most of the time, we know what it is like not to be fooled. Smith urges us to remember those times of “splenetic humor”—illness, usually—when we fail to appreciate beauty, utility, “that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and oeconomy of the great.” In sickness, we “consider the real satisfaction which all these things are capable of affording” and find wealth “in the highest degree contemptible and trifling.”
This isn’t a prescription for lifelong malingering. It’s a reminder instead to maintain an attitude of ambiguity towards wealth even when one’s full sympathetic and aesthetic faculties are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. After all, without Marianne’s earlier self-deception, there wouldn’t be much of a novel. (Elinor and Edward are clearly not emo enough to sustain three volumes of agony, even with the Lucy Steele complication lurking.) Literature is generated in the end by someone’s failure to recognize nature’s deception, just as Adam Smith promised.
* * *
We’ll never know how Austen really felt about the very small fortune that she made from the books that were published in her lifetime, or the labors that produced them. But despite her family’s best efforts to represent her as a talented amateur after her death, the fact was that she was up at her desk as early as Marianne, writing and revising early in the morning, as she knew that other tasks would occupy her later in the day. Her struggles will sound remarkably familiar to anyone who earns a living by her pen. “I am not at all in a humour for writing, I must write on till I am,” she told Cassandra in a letter.
As an academic who studies 18th-century political economy and philosophy, the apparently infinite adaptability of an Austen novel has always struck me as something of a mystery. Sense and Sensibility is the greatest mystery of all: Its ambiguity about the pursuit of wealth and the terms in which this is constructed seem ultimately untranslatable without the History of Economics 101.
But perhaps it is fortune hunting in our modern meaning of that word which restores some of our ambivalence and interest in the inner moral lives of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Why don’t they just go out and get jobs, instead of looking for rich men, after all? Earning a fortune might no longer trigger our collective gag reflex, but marrying one? That still generates plenty of squeamish plot.
Shannon Chamberlain is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
source: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/...
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By the end of Jane Austen’s life, on £400 a year a family could employ two maidservants, one horse and a groom. £400 a year is about what Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters have. On £700 a family could keep one man, three maidservants, and two horses. That is approximately what Elinor and Edward marry on. With £1,000 a year, a family could blossom out into an establishment of three female servants, a coachman and footman, a chariot or coach, phaeton or other four-wheeled carriage, and a pair of horses. On £5,000 a year the establishment grew to about thirteen male and nine female servants, ten horses, a coach, curricle and a chaise or gig. Mr. Bingley had up to £6,000 a year. The Darcys, of course, had £10,000 a year.
As to wages, a young maidservant might expect from £5 to £11 a year (perhaps a little more in very wealthy households). The wages were actually expressed in guineas - a guinea being 105% of a pound sterling.
Other typical annual salaries were £24 for a housekeeper, £30 for a governess, £50 for a butler and £9 for a scullion.
Jane Austen knows money is important but she disapproves of anyone obsessed by it. The rich should behave generously and without airs. People should not seek (as Wickham and Mr. Elliot do) to marry only for money. In Willoughby, such motivation is soundly punished.
Jane's heroines do not have a mercenary thought. Not one thinks of marrying for anything but love – not even the future Mrs. Darcy, even though she reflects that 'to be mistress of Pemberley might be something'! Marriage that happened to bring money was fair enough; but only if it was founded on love. Jane herself turned down an opportunity of marrying the heir to an estate – Harris Bigg Wither – because she did not truly love him.
source: https://web.archive.org/web/201408150...
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Did Emma Woodhouse really love Mr. Knightley all along?
Emma had said she would never marry; or, if she did, her husband would be the renowned Frank Churchill. Such was her self-deception even before she met Frank. Yet, it is Knightley's opinions that always concern her. When she disagrees with him (about Robert Martin), she is made uncomfortable by his criticism, for she has a 'habitual respect' for his judgement. She likes to have him on her side, to be friends with her, and willingly resorts to feminine wiles to gain reconciliation: ...she hoped it might rather assist the restoration of friendship, that when he came into the room she had one of the children with her... very happy to be danced about in her aunt's arms.
Always conscious of Knightley, Emma has a thorough understanding and appreciation of him. When he provides his carriage to take Jane and Miss Bates to the dinner with the Coles, Emma says: I know no man more likely than Mr. Knightley to do the sort of thing – to do anything really good-natured, useful, considerate or benevolent. He is not a gallant man, but he is a very humane one. Similarly, while others are baffled, she can be sure it was not Mr. Knightley who sent the piano to Jane. She knows he does nothing mysteriously.
Whenever he frankly points out Emma's faults, she is affected. As her 'education' progresses, she acts increasingly upon his criticisms. Emma makes efforts to please him. 'Conscience-stricken', she invites Jane Fairfax to dinner. After the Box Hill picnic, in which Knightley's criticism of her rudeness to Miss Bates reduces her to tears, she goes through a period of repentance and emerges a transformed person - as kind and considerate to others as Mr. Knightley himself - and, inspired by him, dedicates herself to a life of compassion and generosity towards Miss Bates and Jane.
Her tears at Box Hill are those of a woman whose body is telling her what her mind has not caught up with. Her flirtation with Frank prevents her from realising Knightley's worth. During the ball at The Crown, even while dancing with Frank, she admires Mr. Knightley - His tall, firm, upright figure - and when he generously invites the unfortunate Harriet to dance, Emma is all pleasure and gratitude... and longed to be thanking him. She catches his eye, her looks conveying much.
On this occasion, Emma is pleased to spend a large part of the rest of the evening dancing with him. She assumes a proprietorial interest in him.
Jane Austen cleverly reveals another symptom of Emma's interest in him. When Harriet recalls how she obtained Mr. Elton's old pencil six months earlier for her 'Most Precious Treasures' collection, she naturally remembers the details of Mr. Elton's speech and behaviour, but Emma has a vivid recollection only of Mr. Knightley: Talking about spruce beer... Mr. Knightley and I both saying we liked it... Mr. Knightley was standing just here...
Emma's lack of success in sketching and Knightley's criticism tell us much about their characters and their relationship. Emma had attempted portraits before Harriet's but not one of them had ever been finished.
'You have made her too tall, Emma,' said Mr. Knightley. Emma knew that she had, but would not own it, and Mr. Elton warmly added, 'Oh, no! certainly not too tall...'.
There is a moment so close to a love-scene that, although Emma has not yet discovered 'with the speed of an arrow' that he must marry nobody but herself, one word more from Knightley would surely make her do so. She has returned home from her penitent visit to Miss Bates, to find Knightley with her father. He is pleased by her act of charity and she is thrilled to have his good opinion restored. The passage is charged with deep but controlled emotion. He looks at her lovingly and takes her hand (or does she offer it to him?):
He took her hand – whether she had not herself made the first motion she could not say – she might, perhaps, have rather offered it – but he took her hand, pressed it and certainly was on the point of carrying it to his lips – when, from some fancy or other, he suddenly let go.
He has remembered that Emma probably loves Frank Churchill. Jane Austen cannot resist a touch of irony in reviewing Emma's thoughts at this moment. It was a pity she had not come back earlier!
When Emma hears later that some astounding news has broken, she does not think first, as Mr. Weston expects, of his son Frank, but says, Something has happened in Brunswick Square. I know it has. Tell me, I charge you tell me this moment what it is. Brunswick Square is where Mr. Knightley is staying at the time!
Emma's impatience for news recalls those moments near the end of Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth Bennet is desperate for news of Darcy's involvement in Lydia's wedding. Elizabeth begs for information from Mrs. Gardiner; Emma from Mr. Weston.
Emma and Mr. Knightley are friends, free and blunt with each other, happy in each other's company and glad of each other's affection. Knightley's natural reticence, coupled with his reluctance to meddle in her emotions, restrain him when she appears to be attached to Frank. At the beginning of the novel their relationship has the intellectual intimacy of marriage (just as Elizabeth and Darcy's soon acquires) but emotional involvement has yet to be recognized, at least on her side. Through her mistakes and blunders, Emma has to discover that her deepest emotional relationship is also with Mr. Knightley.
When Mr. Knightley proposes, there are still six chapters to come in the novel - the earliest point at which an Austen heroine receives a proposal. All the other novels end fairly close to the proposal and acceptance. If the reader succeeds eventually in loving Emma, it probably dates from her behaviour when it seems Mr. Knightley is going to tell her he loves Harriet: Emma could not bear to give him pain.
She thinks he is on the edge of destroying her life by saying he loves Harriet, and yet she courageously realises that, even if that is true, she must stick by him. Even if he had admitted that at thirty-seven he had fallen for a schoolgirl, Emma would have sided with them both against Highbury and the sniggering world.
source: https://web.archive.org/web/201405281...
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September 28, 2020
The novelist was a keen observer of her time. Now readers want to make her a mirror of our own.
“What would Jane Austen say?” is a fun game to play, but the truth is that we have no idea. For a writer of her renown, the biographical record is unusually thin. No notebooks or diaries survive. After Austen died, in 1817, her sister, Cassandra, destroyed or censored most of Jane’s letters to her, and after their brother Francis’s death his daughter destroyed all of Jane’s letters to him.
The letters that remain are not especially “Austenian,” and they can be a little hard-hearted and judgy, which does not match very well the image of Austen in the pious biographical sketch written by her brother Henry, shortly after her death, or in the memoir by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, published more than fifty years later, which is mainly family oral remembrance, and in which she is “dear Aunt Jane.”
The novels are not much help, either. Besides the usual difficulties involved in trying to extract a moral from works of literature, there is the problem of Austen’s irony. She is not just representing characters in her novels; she is representing the discursive bubble those characters inhabit, and she almost never steps outside that bubble. She is always ventriloquizing. Virginia Woolf compared her to Shakespeare: “She flatters and cajoles you with the promise of intimacy and then, at the last moment, there is the same blankness. Are those Jane Austen’s eyes or is it a glass, a mirror, a silver spoon held up in the sun?”
Instead of asking what Austen is trying to tell us, we might ask what she’s trying to show us. But the answer to that seems to be: It depends on who’s looking. In her lifetime, Austen was popular with a certain class of readers, the fashionable and well-off, who enjoyed her novels, particularly “Pride and Prejudice,” as comedies of manners. They got the jokes, and you always feel good about an author when you are in on her jokes.
But Austen was hardly a best-seller, and by the eighteen-twenties her books were often out of print. The critical line on her, even from admirers like Sir Walter Scott, was that she was a miniaturist specializing in an exceedingly narrow sector of British society, the landed gentry. Everyone agreed that she captured that world with astonishing precision; not everyone felt that it was a world worth capturing. “A carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers,” Charlotte Brontë described “Pride and Prejudice” to a friend. “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”
Queen Victoria was a fan (a taste, possibly the only one, she shared with B. B. King), and after the publication of Austen-Leigh’s memoir, in 1869, Austen enjoyed a revival. What had put off readers like Charlotte Brontë now became the basis of her appeal. Her books transported readers to a simpler time and place. They were escapist fiction. Winston Churchill had “Pride and Prejudice” read aloud to him when he was recovering from pneumonia during the Second World War. “What calm lives they had, those people!” was his thought. “No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.”
The suggestion that Austen might have had anything critical to say about those people would have spoiled the illusion. “She is absolutely at peace with her most comfortable world,” Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, explained. “She never even hints at a suspicion that squires and parsons of the English type are not an essential part of the order of things.”
Still, there were readers who detected an edge. Woolf was one. “I would rather not find myself in the room alone with her,” she wrote. The British critic D. W. Harding, in 1939, proposed that Austen’s books were enjoyed “by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked; she is a literary classic of the society which attitudes like hers, held widely enough, would undermine.” The title of his essay was “Regulated Hatred.” Lionel Trilling, in 1955, called Austen “an agent of the Terror,” meaning that she is merciless in forcing us to confront our moral weaknesses.
Today, there are two Austens, with, probably, a fair amount of overlap: the recreational reader’s Austen and the English professor’s Austen. For the recreational reader, the novels are courtship stories, and the attraction is the strong women characters who, despite the best efforts of rivals and relations to screw things up, always succeed in making the catch. “Boy meets girl, girl gets boy” is the bumper-sticker version.
This category of reader presumably makes up a big part of the audience for the movie and television adaptations, a steady stream of entertainment product that shows no signs of slowing. Since 1995, there have been at least one screen adaptation of “Northanger Abbey,” two of “Sense and Sensibility,” two of “Mansfield Park,” two of “Persuasion,” three of “Pride and Prejudice,” and four of “Emma.” “Lady Susan,” a short epistolary novel Austen wrote when she was eighteen, was made into a movie by Whit Stillman in 2016, and last year Andrew Davies adapted Austen’s last novel, “Sanditon,” into a miniseries, even though she had finished only eleven chapters of it (about a fifth) before she died.
The English professor likes the strong women, too, and watches the adaptations (with a learned and critical eye). But the professor thinks that the novels are about things that people like Churchill and Leslie Stephen thought they leave out: the French Revolution, slavery, the empire, patriarchy, the rights of women. Those subjects might not be in the foreground, but that’s because they were not inside the English gentry’s bubble. The slave trade was not something that ladies and gentlemen talked about—particularly if they had some financial connection to it, as several of Austen’s characters seem to. There are plenty of hints in the books about what is going on in the larger world. Those hints must be there for a reason.
But what is the reason? Do the novels have a political subtext? Since there are few signs of unconventional political views in the biographical record, one approach is to separate Austen from her novels—what she believed from what she wrote. In “Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics” (Oxford), for example, Tom Keymer, who teaches at the University of Toronto, explains that Austen was a novelist “in whom an implicitly Tory world view is frequently interrogated or disrupted by destabilizing ironies and irruptions of satirical anger that are no less real for the elegance and wit of their expression.”
Literature professors love the notion of texts “interrogating” things; I am a literature professor, and I have certainly used that line. But, in this case, it feels like fence-straddling. It asks us to accept an Austen who is somehow simultaneously conservative as a person and subversive as a writer. Keymer says things like “The courtship plot that structures all six of Austen’s published novels, though sometimes held to imply her endorsement of a patriarchal status quo, is equally a means of exploring themes of female disempowerment.” It’s hard to see how the novels can be “equally” endorsements of patriarchy and criticisms of it.
Keymer doesn’t mention Helena Kelly’s “Jane Austen, the Secret Radical” (2016), but, in some respects, his little book, which is a somewhat cautious introduction to reading Austen, rather than a full-dress critical appraisal, could be thought of as a response to hers. Kelly, as her title suggests, has no trouble naming Austen’s politics. Austen lived, after all, in an age of revolutions, and Kelly thinks that her novels are “as revolutionary, at their heart, as anything that Wollstonecraft or Tom Paine wrote.” They just have to be read “the right way.”
“The right way” means treating the brief glimpses Austen gives us of life outside her characters’ social circles—and, once you start looking, you see them all over the place—as pieces of a puzzle that, when assembled, reveals what is really going on. Kelly makes a case, for example, that passing references in “Emma” to ditches and hedges, along with a scrap of conversation about relocating a public path, are meant to signal to us that Emma’s neighbor and future husband, Mr. Knightley, is engaged in an aggressive campaign to enclose his land—that is, to fence it off in order to prevent local people from exercising the “rights of common.”
This was the right to enter private land for specified purposes, such as grazing, fishing, foraging, gathering firewood, and so on, and for many people in rural England it helped make ends meet. Kelly cites the scholar Ruth Perry as calculating that access to private lands (as virtually all lands in England were) essentially doubled the income of farming families. Once those lands were legally enclosed, however, it became a crime to trespass on them. Kelly thinks that the poultry thieves who steal Mrs. Weston’s turkeys at the end of “Emma” are meant to show us the economic damage being caused by Mr. Knightley’s enclosures. Why else would Austen have put them in her story? The plot does not require turkey thieves.
Kelly’s Mr. Knightley, in short, is a heartless landowner intent on building a private fiefdom. She thinks the reason he marries Emma is that he wants to absorb her property, one of the few parcels of land around Highbury he does not already own, into his estate. Keymer would not object to this line of interpretation, presumably—“implication, not explication, was Austen’s way,” he says—but would be reluctant to conclude that it means that Austen was a revolutionary.
In “30 Great Myths About Jane Austen” (Wiley Blackwell), two eminent Austen scholars, Claudia L. Johnson, from Princeton, and Clara Tuite, from the University of Melbourne, take on some of the characterizations of Austen in general circulation: “There is no sex in Jane Austen’s novels,” “Jane Austen was unconscious of her art,” “Jane Austen’s novels are about good manners,” and twenty-seven more.
The book is not an exercise in pure debunking (as entertaining as that would have been), because Johnson and Tuite hold the view that although some of these myths—“Jane Austen disapproved of the theatre,” for instance—are demonstrably false, many have become inseparable from the way Austen is read and received. The scholars’ point is that even mistaken assumptions about Austen reveal something in her work that is worth digging into.
The belief that Austen was hostile to the theatre comes from “Mansfield Park,” whose plot turns on a private theatrical that the novel’s prudish protagonist, Fanny Price, considers objectionable, because it permits people to simulate passions that, in real life, would be illicit. And Fanny proves to be right—one of the amateur actors later runs off with another man’s wife, a woman he had flirted with when they were rehearsing, ruining her reputation.
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But we know that Austen loved going to the theatre (she also loved to dance), and that she enjoyed composing and acting in private theatricals organized by her siblings—which makes for an interesting interpretive problem. What is Austen trying to show us about the theatre in “Mansfield Park”? And this turns out to be very hard to pin down.
Like Keymer, Johnson and Tuite are therefore sometimes led into critical impasses, points at which an interpretation can be argued either way. In a chapter on “Jane Austen was a feminist/Jane Austen was not a feminist,” for example, they propose that “both elements of this myth are true and untrue.” Maybe this is the best that can be said on the subject, but it is not a premise that gets us very far.
Johnson and Tuite think that the reason we keep running into conundrums like these is that readers project their own views onto Austen. Some readers want to see a feminist, and other readers prefer to see a writer who does not make it her business to question the status quo. “Because Austen herself is such a mythic, beloved figure,” they explain, “many readers have tended to align her with their own yearnings, social outlooks, and dispositions.”
Surely this is backward. Isn’t it because Austen’s texts are so indeterminate that she is beloved by people who come to her with different prejudices and expectations? And isn’t her mythic stature produced by her writing, rather than projected by her readers? Isn’t inscrutability part of the intention? That we don’t know much about Austen from her letters (or from what we have of them) suggests that she didn’t want people to know much about her, period.
All of Austen’s novels are about misinterpretation, about people reading other people incorrectly. Catherine Morland, in “Northanger Abbey,” reads General Tilney wrong. Elizabeth Bennet reads Mr. Darcy wrong. Marianne Dashwood, in “Sense and Sensibility,” gets Willoughby wrong, and Edmund Bertram, in “Mansfield Park,” gets Mary Crawford wrong. Emma gets everybody wrong. There might be a warning to the reader here: do not think that you are getting it right, either.
“Emma,” for instance, is the only mature novel Austen named for a character, and that is because the entire narrative, except for one chapter, is from Emma’s point of view. The novel is therefore Emma’s story, the story of a young woman who, after considering herself rather too good for the marriage game, ends up marrying the most eligible man in town. Mr. Knightley also happens to be the brother of Emma’s sister’s husband, and, whether it was his intention or not, the marriage does further strengthen the union of their two estates. The Knightleys and the Woodhouses are now one family. The marital outcome consolidates the existing social order. No boats are being rocked.
Many readers also feel, with Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley, a sense of moral closure. For the spark is lit when he reproves her for a rather mild insult to Miss Bates, a woman who belongs to their social class but has lost almost all her income. Being called out for this breach of etiquette is what sets Emma on a path of reappraisal and makes her vow to be a better person, which turns out to be a person who falls in love with her reprover. Proper manners, behaving in a way appropriate to one’s status, is what holds the order in place.
The ending of “Emma” therefore might seem to confirm the belief that Austen is a conservative at heart: this is how she likes things to turn out. But there is another marriage plot in “Emma.” It involves a secret engagement between Jane, an orphan with no prospects, and Frank, the son of a local man (Mr. Weston) who has been adopted and raised by the Churchills, a wealthy family with houses in Yorkshire and London and its environs.
Frank stands to inherit the Churchill estate, but could be cut off if he marries a penniless woman like Jane over the objections of Mrs. Churchill. Frank and Jane both show up in Highbury, and much of the action is driven by Frank’s attempts to see Jane without raising suspicions that they are lovers. There are clues all along, but we miss or misinterpret them because Emma misses and misinterprets them. Emma thinks that Frank is courting her, but he’s only using her as a distraction.
In the end, Frank and Jane’s difficulties are overcome, and they marry. They will probably be much richer than Emma and Mr. Knightley, and they don’t have to spend the rest of their lives in provincial Highbury. It’s an outcome with a completely different spin. Jane and Frank weren’t born to their fortune, and they haven’t really earned it. They just lucked out. Meanwhile, Frank has violated all the canons of proper behavior. He is not who he pretends to be. He lies to everyone; he toys with Emma’s affections; he torments his fiancée by making a show of ignoring her. And yet he gets the girl and the houses. What’s the lesson there?
The people who read Austen for the romance and the people who read Austen for the sociology are both reading her correctly, because Austen understands courtship as an attempt to achieve the maximum point of intersection between love and money. Characters who are in the marriage game just for love, like Marianne Dashwood, in “Sense and Sensibility,” are likely to get burned. Characters in it just for the money, like Maria Bertram, in “Mansfield Park,” are likely to be unhappy.
It’s possible for the parties to settle for considerably less than the maximum, as Mr. Collins and Charlotte Lucas do, in “Pride and Prejudice.” She desperately needs a husband for financial reasons; he needs a wife for professional ones. She knows that he’s an unctuous creep, and that he proposed to Elizabeth Bennet a day before he propositioned her. And he knows that she knows it. But they establish a modus vivendi. They are fine with setting the love curve at zero.
That’s not good enough, though, for leading characters like Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor Dashwood, and Fanny Price. However dire their financial situation, and in every case it’s pretty dire, they want to marry for love. Mr. Darcy is fabulously wealthy, and Elizabeth, when her father dies, will have almost nothing, but she has no hesitation rejecting his first marriage proposal, because she hates him.
What is exceptional about Austen as a novelist is that she tells us exactly how much money each of her characters has. She gives us far more information than Dickens, who was at least as obsessed with class and income as she was, or George Eliot. We know not merely that Elizabeth will be poor when her father dies. We know precisely what her income will be: forty pounds a year. We also know why Elizabeth’s prospects are so grim: because her father has neglected to plan for his daughters. He has almost no savings, and his property is entailed to the closest male heir—who happens to be the egregious Mr. Collins.
For British readers in the nineteenth century, these numbers conveyed very specific information. Most American readers today probably gloss over them. We don’t know what it signifies to have x number of pounds a year. When we read, in “Emma,” that “the charming Augusta Hawkins, in addition to all the usual advantages of perfect beauty and merit, was in possession of an independent fortune, of so many thousands as would always be called ten,” we can tell there is a joke there, and we might even chuckle fake-knowingly, but we aren’t in on it.
That’s because we don’t know what Austen’s nineteenth-century readers would have known, which is that a fortune of ten thousand pounds represents the minimum point on the money curve. Those ten thousand pounds would be invested in government bonds with an effective rate of five per cent. And, if you had five hundred pounds a year and no dependents, you could live comfortably and did not need to work.
Most of Austen’s characters who are on the marriage market want to do better than five hundred a year, of course. Augusta Hawkins needn’t worry; in addition to her own fortune, she has her marriage to the local vicar, who has an income from tithes. According to Ivan Nottingham, one of the people who have studied Austen and money, with a thousand pounds a year you could afford a comfortable life with a staff of three female servants, a coachman, a footman, a carriage, and horses.
The movie and television adaptations often make a point of showing us just how many servants are around all the time, although in the Keira Knightley “Pride and Prejudice,” released in 2005, the financial condition of the Bennets is made to appear rather shabby. They are shown to live in a ramshackle house with chickens in the yard, and we see few servants. But the family in the novel is actually quite well off. They have a cook, a housekeeper, a butler, a footman, a coachman, horses, and two maids. The Bennets’ problem is not a lack of assets; it’s mismanagement.
Few female characters in Austen have the kind of money that Emma does. She has thirty thousand pounds, and along with her sister she will inherit the family house. Mr. Darcy’s income is ten thousand a year. He is not the richest character in Austen. Mr. Rushworth, in “Mansfield Park,” has twelve thousand a year. (Mr. Rushworth is also a complete chucklehead; he is the man Maria Bertram makes the mistake of marrying.) Those were very large incomes. They place Darcy and Rushworth in the top one per cent of households in Austen’s Britain, even though neither man is a peer.
We can put all these numbers in perspective by noting that the average annual income in Britain was thirty pounds. (Thirty pounds was the typical salary for a governess, the fate that awaits Jane, in “Emma,” if she fails to marry.) Farmworkers had an annual income of around twenty pounds. Men working in paper mills could make about sixty pounds a year. Women workers were paid much less. People who were forced by debt to live in the poorhouse had to subsist on six and half pounds a year, paid from parish taxes.
These levels of inequality persisted through most of the nineteenth century, a period that saw almost no over-all inflation—which is why readers would have known how to “decode” the economic profiles of Austen’s characters. In the Sherlock Holmes story “The Sign of the Four,” published in 1890, Dr. Watson tells the woman who stands to inherit a trove of rare gems, “You will have a couple of hundred thousand. . . . An annuity of ten thousand pounds. There will be few richer young ladies in England. Is it not glorious?” The math is the same as it is in “Pride and Prejudice.”
So is the wealth distribution. In Austen’s day, the top ten per cent of households in Britain owned eighty-five per cent of the national wealth, and the top one per cent, the Darcys and the Rushworths, owned fifty-five per cent. The bottom half owned nothing. If we are inclined to raise an eyebrow at these figures, we should remember that in the United States today the top one per cent of households own more than thirty per cent of the wealth, the top ten per cent about seventy per cent, and the bottom half less than two per cent.
Where Charlotte Brontë and Leslie Stephen went wrong was in assuming that the world of the Woodhouses and the Knightleys, the Bingleys and the Bertrams, was Jane Austen’s world, that she was writing about her own social circle. But Austen did not belong to that circle. She knew and observed people in it, of course, but her own family belonged to what is called the “pseudo-gentry”—families that lived like the gentry, had the gentry’s taste and manners, and often married into the gentry, but depended on a male family member with a job to maintain their style of life.
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Austen’s father, George, was the rector of two Anglican parishes, from which he earned, from the combined tithes, two hundred and ten pounds a year. To add to this extremely modest income, the family also sold farm produce, and George and his wife, Cassandra, ran a school for boys out of their house. In 1797, Claire Tomalin tells us in her biography of Jane Austen, the family bought a carriage; in 1798, they had to give it up. In 1800, the farm brought in almost three hundred pounds, but tithes fell, owing to a depression. The Austens, a family of ten, seem rarely to have broken the five-hundred-pound mark.
When clergymen died, the Church made no provisions for their families, and when George Austen died, in 1805, Jane, her sister, and her mother were left with enough capital to pay them two hundred pounds a year. Otherwise, they depended on contributions from the brothers; they lived in a small cottage on the estate of one brother, Edward. Jane’s total income from the four books she published in her lifetime was six hundred and eighty-four pounds. Jane Austen was not “comfortable” in the world of her novels, because she did not live in that world.
Does this mean that she was pressing her nose against the glass, imagining a life she was largely excluded from? Or does it mean that she could see with the clarity and unsentimentality of the outsider the fatuity of those people and the injustices and inequalities their comforts were built on? We can only guess. ♦
source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
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By Adelle Waldman (April 05, 2013)
https://slate.com/culture/2013/04/jan...
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https://mantex.co.uk/jane-austen-lite...
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W.A. Craick, Jane Austen: the Six Novels, London: Methuen, 1965.
D.D. Devlin, Jane Austen and Education, London, 1975.
Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels, Baltimore (Md) and London, 1971.
✔Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination, New Haven and London, 1979.
✔John Halperin (ed), Jane Austen Bicentenary Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
✔Barbara Hardy, A Reading of Jane Austen, London, 1975.
Joycelyn Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, Cambridge, 1989.
Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, Chicago and London, 1988.
Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction, Brighton and Totawa (NJ) 1983.
✔Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.
A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen: a Study of her Artistic Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Juliet McMaster (ed), Jane Austen’s Achievement, London: Macmillan, 1976.
✔David Monaghan, Jane Austen in a Social Context, Totawa (NJ) 1981.
Laura G. Mooneyham, Romance, Language, and Education in Jane Austen’s Novels, New York and Basingstoke, 1988.
✔Susan Morgan, In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction, Chicago, 1980.
Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen, London: Blackwell, 1972.
K.C. Phillips, Jane Austen’s English, London: Andre Deutsch, 1970.
F.B. Pinion, A Jane Austen Companion, London: Macmillan, 1976.
Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution, New York, 1979.
B.C. Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development through the Surviving Papers, London and New York, 1964.
B.C. Southam (ed), Critical Essays on Jane Austen, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.
✔B.C. Southam (ed), Jane Austen: the Critical Heritage, 2 vols, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1968-87.
Alison G. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood, Philadelphia, 1989.
✔Tony Tanner, Jane Austen, London: Macmillan, 1986.
Ian Watt (ed), Jane Austen: a Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice-Hall, 1963.
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From "Pride and Promiscuity" to "Virtues and Vices," a look at the Regency Era's decades-long steamy reappraisal
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a dominant man in possession of a good set of cuffs, must be in want of a much younger, submissive wife.” So begins "Spank Me, Mr. Darcy" (2013) by Jane Austen and Lissa Trevor.
If Jane Austen were alive today, someone might well suggest to her that she desperately needs a brand manager. Her image is so conflict-ridden, so confused, that you can’t tell what she’s supposed to stand for anymore. She’s some sort of secret radical, but she’s also the doyenne of the alt-right. She’s our upright moral traditionalist, a vanilla marriage endorser, and the inspirer of Christian dating guides. But hold the phone! She’s also a snarky feminist satirist, the Notorious Jenny-A, whose hunky heroes get us hot and bothered. She’s Prim Austen and Porn Austen.
Yes, Virginia: Porn Austen. You may already know that Jane Austen-inspired erotic fiction is going through something of a boom. It shouldn’t surprise. There’s smut everything, and there’s Jane Austen everything. Why wouldn’t there be Jane Austen erotica? It’s not just zombies and vampires, gin and tattoos, or wet-white-shirt Darcys and Bridget Jones movies that have recast Austen as the Melissa McCarthy of classic novelists. But getting a grip on Austen’s rebirth as literary history’s hilarious best horny girlfriend requires grappling with a further shade of grey: the slow, successful rise of Austen-inspired erotica.
Colin Firth’s performance in Andrew Davies’s BBC "Pride and Prejudice" (1995) is usually credited with Austen’s turn toward the titillating. As a headline once trumpeted, “Thank the BBC for Jane Austen Erotica.” But things were getting steamy for Austen long before Davies and Firth came onto the scene, as I describe in my new book, "The Making of Jane Austen." Smoldering actor-Darcys date back as far as the pioneering "Pride and Prejudice" stage adaptation of 1935 by Helen Jerome. That hit Broadway play ended with a lust-filled Darcy grabbing a weepy Elizabeth, declaring her cruel, kind, and lovely, and “folding her close” “his lips on hers.” Curtain.
A passionate stage kiss is just that, of course, but more sexually explicit fare would follow. As we try to come to grips with Austen’s longevity and iconicity in this, her bicentenary year, we ought to examine what the most blatantly sexed-up Austens mean. It’s a longer, hotter, and weirder history than we’ve previously realized.
Two kinds of Austen erotica have flourished in the 21st century: send-up and straight-up.
The send-ups goes for humor by juxtaposition, playing Austen off of her prim reputation for laughs or shock value. "Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen" (2001), by Arielle Eckstut and Dennis Ashton, spoof-claims finding a hidden cache of her lewd writing. The "Jane Austen Kama Sutra: A Playful Presentation of Sense and Sensuality" (2016) features compromising silhouettes, accompanied by double-entendre Austen quotes, like “I will be mistress of myself” and “Men never know when things are dirty or not.” Vulgar Regency silhouettes may or may not be to your taste, but they certainly take a bold step beyond the naked lady posed on the mud flaps of pick-up trucks.
The straight-up, serious stuff tends toward soft-core and print-based. (I will leave the question of whether Nica Noelle’s Sweet Sinner adult films are indebted to Austen adaptations to be, er, explored by another scholar.) Austen erotica has been very commercially successful, with Linda Berdoll’s "Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife" series (1999 and after) self-reporting total sales of 400,000 copies. Others followed. Mitzi Szereto’s "Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts" (2011) uses the tagline “The classic that goes all the way!” It prompted The Los Angeles Times to ask its readers, “Do you want a XXX Jane Austen? Vote in our poll.” A thousand answered; forty percent said yes. It hasn’t all been straight-up straight either, of course. A bisexual version got some traction: "Pride/Prejudice: The Hidden Secret" (2010), by Ann Herendeen, which reimagines Charles Bingley as Darcy’s lover and Charlotte Lucas as Elizabeth Bennet’s. Austen erotic mash-ups have had a go of it in two separate series, Clandestine Classics and the Wild & Wanton editions. William Deresiewicz has called these “a new low in Austen-exploitation, even worse than 'Pride and Predator' or 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.'”
Whether or not it’s a low is open to question, but it’s definitely not new. A now little-known novel, Grania Beckford’s "Virtues and Vices: A Delectable Rondelet of Love and Lust in Edwardian Times" (1980), appears to be the very first example of the genre. Beckford’s libidinous tale moves Austen’s plot forward a century from Regency to Edwardian England. It forgoes today’s ubiquitous "Pride and Prejudice" for "Persuasion," specifically the widow-neighbor Lady Russell and vain widower Sir Walter Elliot, who is renamed Sir Wilfred. Literally everyone in Beckford’s novel is having sex with everyone else — men, women and even children. There is every kind of vice but little in the way of virtue. Austen-inspired pedophilia and incest move Beckford’s novel far away indeed from contemporary mommy erotica. Beckford makes "Fifty Shades"-inspired Austen fare seem completely garden-variety by comparison.
The sex acts that "Virtues and Vices" narrates are often abusive and illegal, yet the novel was, oddly enough, going for humor. The book flap describes it as a “sophisticated comic romance.” Because its stories are told in the first person in the voices of many different characters, a moralizing narrator never weighs in to judge something right or wrong. Rakish Sir Wilfred Elliot is said to have a bedroom of wall-to-wall mirrors. The little detail of his be-mirrored estate is lifted out of Austen’s original, but the rest is Beckford’s embellishment. Readers learn about Sir Wilfred’s bedroom mirrors through his widow-neighbor Lady Russell’s description of cavorting with him in front of them. She watches her lover admire the size of his own member in reflection. It’s a perfectly chosen comic X-rated detail to elaborate on the original novel’s exploration of his vanity.
Other chapters, too, take small bits from Austen’s original and amplify them into darkly comic sexual exploits. The chapter narrated by the flirtatious Louisa Musgrove (renamed Lucinda) describes her doing it with hero Wentworth in clichéd, florid language. The manipulative widow Mrs. Clay is revealed not to be lawyer Mr. Shepherd’s relative but his former lover. Even Lady Russell has an affair with “Kevin” Wentworth. She’s a discreet lover, which matters greatly because she’s also sexually involved with his heroine and future wife, Angela Elliot, renamed from Austen’s Anne. The oldest Elliot daughter, Edwina (Elizabeth in the original) describes her sexual relationship with her father, including a game in which she nurses him like a baby at her bosom. The book sets out to make readers deeply uncomfortable. And yet in between the in flagrante delicto moments are references to all manner of literary texts and authors, including Rudyard Kipling, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Gustave Flaubert. Jane Austen’s name, however, is never mentioned.
"Virtues and Vices" may be abominable, but it’s not brainless. It’s possible to read it as both send-up and serious, simultaneously satirizing and aping Austen and pornography. It’s not unlike the serious-minded play with literary and social conventions of Austen’s "Northanger Abbey" or her raucous juvenilia. This may be more sophisticated analysis than Beckford’s novel deserves, but it’s only fitting that it receive some serious analysis now. As disturbing as some parts are, it’s also a notable text that wasn't read as a rewriting of Jane Austen when it was released. Only one review recognizes that the novel’s aims are comic. Publishers Weekly calls it a “delightfully foolish erotic spoof, a romp through the bedchambers of an English family,” although “not stinging enough to be called satire, nor provocative enough to be called porn.” Another reviewer reports that she refuses to finish it, opening with “Forewarning! This is not a review. It’s rebellion. I REBEL!! I don’t have to read stuff like this,” and concluding, “Pornography itself quickly becomes boring but add minutely graphic lessons in incest, eroticism, licentiousness, etc. . . . nausea is incipient . . . . By comparison [novelist Joseph] Wambaugh is conservative.”
Never mind Wambaugh. Who was Grania Beckford, that nausea-inducing innovator? The "Virtues and Vices" book flap describes her as a divorcée “born third-six years ago in Ireland” and a “citizen of the world.” The publisher adds, “She has a wide knowledge of history with a special love for the luscious Edwardian epoch,” with her previous novel given the capsule description of “‘Upstairs, Downstairs,' porno-style.” Beckford herself is quoted as saying, “I live out of a suitcase, with a portable typewriter, off alimony, and under a cloud.”
But Grania Beckford wasn’t a woman. Beckford was one of the many pseudonyms of the late Roger Erskine Longrigg (1929–2000). (It seems important to stop here, for just a moment, to enjoy the absolute perfection of Austen’s pioneering first pornographer being a man whose given names were “Roger” and “Longrigg.” To make it even more perfect, his brother, Johnnie Longrigg, was an MI6 spy.) Roger Longrigg was a prolific novelist of some fame and infamy. He published 55 books of genre fiction under at least seven pseudonyms, bursting onto the scene by successfully duping audiences into believing he was a female teenager named Rosalind Erskine. As Erskine, he published a novel about boarding school girls turning their school gym into a brothel, "The Passion Flower Hotel" (1962). It became a bestseller, was made into a musical, and gave Nastassja Kinski her first German film role. But Longrigg’s ruse of being a teenage girl-author lasted only three years. When his cover was blown, he went on to other pseudonyms.
Author-chameleon Longrigg was canny to choose a freewheeling middle-aged divorcée as his persona — perfect for the era. But apparently neither Longrigg-as-Beckford nor his publisher, St. Martin’s Press, thought marketing the novel as Austen-inspired porn would help it sell to women. Virtues and Vices was even given a second chance, republished by Granada Press the next year as "Catch the Fire: A Smouldering World of Erotic Passion" (1981). This time, on the back-cover copy, there’s a reference to Kellynch Hall and the Elliots, as well as a subtle nod to Austen’s original title. The marketing blurb reads, “Catch the heat of true love and gentle persuasion engulfed by evil machinations.” Surely some readers got it?
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It’s hard to imagine a publisher today producing Erotic Austen that didn’t trumpet its connection to her. One wonders if the publishers then even knew. At a moment when sexy Austen is hyper-marketable, we need to flag the fact that the apparent originator of Smutty Austen never mentions his source author and text. Even more improbably, he, writing as a woman, manages to fly under the radar in both the initial reviews and in the robust field of Austen criticism for years, until now. Longrigg deserves his page or two in Austen’s legacy and literary history. He did his part to innovate. Commercial Austen, like Erotic Austen, was just in a very different economy.
What does it all mean, then, the contemporary tussle between Naughty Austen and Prim Austen? If these versions of her have been jockeying for position for forty years, the smackdown cannot really be all that momentous to her reputation going forward from here. Granted, some change is afoot. As we become more accustomed to juxtaposing Austen with sex, booze, and blood (e.g. sex, wet white shirts, the Austen-branded Bath Gin, vampires, zombies), it must shift expectations. It only stands to reason that the more proximate Austen is to vice, the less she’ll seem to represent virtue. For the moment, however, the virtue-inspired Austen homages are flourishing, too, if not word-for-word and dollar-for-dollar.
The recent flurry of Austen erotica is arguably also changing how we read prototype Austen now. Sexed-up adaptations encourage us to imagine that illicit activity lurks around every character and corner, every nook and cranny, and every sly line of Austen’s originals. Such things are no doubt sometimes there, but are they everywhere? The popularity of this genre makes it difficult to conclude that her cigars may ever be just cigars, her toothpick cases ever just toothpick cases.
Yet if the long, complex history of Austen’s legacy shows us anything, it’s that starkly opposing visions and versions stick to her and have stuck with us for nearly two centuries, showing no sign of settling down. With past as prologue, we should move forward with the confidence that as long we keep reading the original texts, our debates about her primness or sexiness will hardly be “settled.” That’s as it should be. In a May 14, 1813 letter to her sister Cassandra, Jane Austen wrote, “If I am a wild Beast, I cannot help it.” For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, the X-Rated Austen phenomenon gives us new ways to read and enjoy that line.
https://www.salon.com/2017/07/16/fift...
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I’d never envisioned teaching Austen's books to a room of men found guilty of making life deeply unfair for others
By DEVONEY LOOSER
https://www.salon.com/2019/03/01/teac...
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By Carmen Gomez-Galisteo
https://revista-anglo-saxonica.org/ar...
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by Devoney Looser
Published: August 14, 2024 2.29pm CEST
https://theconversation.com/3-of-jane...
More than two centuries after Jane Austen died in 1817, many of the English novelist’s fans want to know her takes on her day’s big issues, including race, colonialism and slavery.
Vigorous debates continue about what she may have thought, but her family’s engagement in the movement to abolish slavery is gradually coming to light.
After scouring 19th-century newspapers and archives for new information, I have discovered that three of Austen’s brothers publicly participated in the abolition movement in the years after her death.
The efforts of one of her brothers, which I unearthed from historical records, are described here for the first time and will be included in my forthcoming book, “Wild for Austen,” in 2025.
Race and slavery in Austen’s novels
Many readers suspect Austen was critical of colonial slavery’s violence and harm, but there’s no consensus on this question. Austen, the author of “Pride and Prejudice” and other classic novels, includes the words “slave” and “slavery” in her fiction on nearly a dozen occasions.
Her last unfinished novel, “Sanditon,” features a mixed-race character named Miss Lambe. She is described as a “half mulatto” heiress from the West Indies.
Timid heroine Fanny Price of “Mansfield Park” asks her imperious uncle Sir Thomas Bertram – who is himself an enslaver – a question about the slave trade. Readers aren’t told how he answers, just that she drops the subject when his response meets with “such a dead silence” from her incurious cousins.
In “Emma,” penniless Jane Fairfax controversially compares being hired as a governess with the miseries of the slave trade. She calls both enslaved people and governesses “victims.”
Experts disagree about whether these examples show Austen’s tacit acceptance or implied criticism of slavery.
Great Britain and colonial slavery
Starting in the 1660s, Great Britain brutally transported about 3.4 million Africans to be enslaved in the Americas – with about half a million dying during the harrowing journey known as the Middle Passage. Many of these enslaved people ended up in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, called the West Indies.
Decades of campaigning by 18th-century abolitionists led to the slave trade’s ban in the British Empire in 1807.
It took more than 20 years of further activism before Parliament abolished slavery in most British colonies in 1833. This was more than three decades before the United States followed suit.
Although Austen died before abolition, the antislavery movement was at full tilt during her lifetime. Her writings offer few clues about her political views, but one surviving letter mentions her love for author and noted abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.
Still, there’s no evidence she openly contributed to the work of his campaigns or other antislavery societies.
Profits from slavery
Some of Austen’s relatives had direct economic ties to slavery.
One was her aunt Jane Leigh Perrot, born into an affluent family of enslavers in Barbados. That aunt had married the wealthy brother of Jane Austen’s mother. The Leigh Perrots stood to inherit a share of her late father’s plantation. Their combined fortune was eventually bequeathed to descendants of James Austen-Leigh, Jane’s eldest brother, who added the surname Leigh in 1837.
There were other Austen family connections to enslavers.
Until 2021, many scholars believed Rev. George Austen, Jane Austen’s father, stood to benefit financially from the Antigua plantation of his former Oxford student, James Langford Nibbs. Rev. Austen was said to have been that plantation’s trustee, but there were significant misunderstandings about his purported role.
Rev. Austen was actually a co-trustee to Nibbs’ 1760 marriage settlement, having just served as the clergyman who married Nibbs and his wife, as I discovered. Rev. Austen’s uncompensated co-trusteeship “would never have involved him in any duties connected with running a plantation,” as legal scholar John Avery Jones has argued.
Research on connections between the Austen family and slavery proceeds.
3 abolitionist brothers
What’s come to light, through my ongoing research, is that three of Jane’s six brothers later became publicly involved in the abolition movement.
One of them was Capt. Charles John Austen. He policed the illegal slave trade in the West Indies in the Royal Navy. He wrote a letter to an English newspaper about his August 1826 capture of a slave ship and shared his observations about the horrific conditions endured by enslaved people on board. His actions, however, allowed the slaver to escape, as I found by examining long overlooked government documents.
More prominent was the abolitionist work of Jane’s brother Henry Thomas Austen, a failed banker turned clergyman. He served as a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, as I first reported in 2021. This fact hadn’t been noticed before, apparently because Henry was then using the name Rev. H. T. Austen. Previous scholars hadn’t realized he was Jane’s brother.
To this expanding Austen family abolitionist history we may now add a third Austen brother, Francis “Frank” William Austen.
It has long been known that Frank, a naval officer, privately expressed abolitionist views. What my new research has uncovered is that he worked openly as a local antislavery activist after Jane’s 1817 death but before the British government passed the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.
That makes Frank the earliest known antislavery activist in Jane Austen’s immediate family.
A motion to end slavery
A short announcement in the Hampshire Chronicle on Feb. 6, 1826, relays: “The Magistrates at Gosport, in compliance with the requisition of many inhabitants, have appointed a meeting for Friday next, to consider the propriety of petitioning Parliament for the Abolition of Slavery in the West India Colonies.”
Frank Austen took a leadership role there, a previously unnoticed fact. At that meeting, “a petition to the House of Commons, praying the abolition of slavery in the West India Colonies, was agreed to.” Capt. Austen of the Royal Navy – Frank Austen – made the motion for the petition’s approval, which then passed.
The abolitionist work in the coastal town of Gosport was part of a national movement. Many cities submitted petitions to an inattentive Parliament. In nearby Portsmouth, a 66-foot-long petition signed by 3,187 people had been sent, “praying for the abolition of negro slavery in the West Indies,” according to another dispatch in the Hampshire Chronicle.
“Praying” here means “requesting,” although there was a spiritual element involved. Prominent members of the British clergy in Bath took a leading role in preparing the petition there. In Gosport, however, the antislavery action came from Frank Austen, along with a solicitor, a surgeon, a grocer and a baker.
The resolution Frank Austen moved to accept called slavery “repugnant.” It demanded “measures … most conducive to the immediate Amelioration of the condition of the Slave population, as well as the gradual but total extinction of Slavery,” according to a report in the Hampshire Telegraph on Feb. 13, 1826.
More to learn
The Jane Austen House Museum in Chawton, England, recently ran an exhibit about Frank Austen, who was born 250 years ago, in 1774. There’s more to learn not only about Jane Austen’s own views of slavery but about Frank Austen himself.
That museum also announced its acquisition of Frank’s unpublished memoir and sketchbook, for which it sought crowd-sourced transcription. Once it’s publicly shared, the memoir could cast further light on his beliefs.
In the meantime, scholars continue to seek new facts, to speculate about what Jane Austen’s fiction says between the lines and to investigate what she may have believed about slavery and abolition. This is happening ahead of the 250th anniversary of her birth on Dec. 16, 2025.
Taken together, these discoveries about the abolitionist activism of three of Jane Austen’s six brothers add weight to the theory that by the end of her life, cut short by illness at age 41, the novelist may herself have been on the road to becoming a passionate, active and public supporter of abolition.
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https://janeausteninvermont.blog/book...
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Noticing and Not Noticing by John Mullan - Part 1
(The Hidden Jane Austen by John Wiltshire.
Cambridge, 195 pp., £17.99, April 2014, 978 1 107 64364 2)
There is no sign that Freud read Jane Austen. Yet in her use of the words ‘unconscious’ and ‘unconsciously’, Austen might have had some claim to his attention. The words had been around in English since the late 17th century, and when Austen first uses one of them, in Sense and Sensibility, it is in a conventional and wholly un-Freudian manner. Elinor Dashwood’s ghastly, venal sister-in-law, seeing the growing attachment between Elinor and her brother, Edward, observes to Elinor’s mother that Edward must find a wealthy or noble wife. There will be trouble for ‘any young woman who attempted to draw him in’. The implication (Elinor is an unacceptable nobody and should lay off) is so crude that Mrs Dashwood ‘could neither pretend to be unconscious, nor endeavour to be calm’. ‘Unconscious’ here means ‘unaware’, ‘uncomprehending’, ‘unwitting’; this is the way the word is commonly used by Austen’s contemporaries and the way it is used elsewhere in Sense and Sensibility and in Austen’s next novel, Pride and Prejudice. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Mr Darcy’s proposal, she nonetheless finds herself gratified ‘to have inspired unconsciously so strong an affection’. To be ‘unconscious’ is simply not to notice something in the world around you.
Then, in Mansfield Park, these words start being used in a new way. The stiff pater familias, Sir Thomas Bertram, returns from Antigua to find that his niece Fanny has progressed from ugly duckling to swan. He can’t help perceiving ‘in a grand and careless way’ that the thoroughly eligible Henry Crawford – rich, elegant, every inch a gentleman – is showing a special interest in her, ‘nor perhaps refrain (though unconsciously) from giving a more willing assent to invitations on that account’. What does ‘unconsciously’ mean here? Sir Thomas has just presided over the mercenary marriage of his eldest daughter, Maria, to a hugely wealthy man whom she despises, though Sir Thomas believes himself ‘infinitely above scheming or contriving’ – that ‘infinitely’ telling us that we are hearing his own proud self-estimation. So ‘unconsciously’ means not noticing something in himself. The evasive double negative (‘nor perhaps refrain’) emphasises his refusal to admit his own calculations to himself. We would now probably say that his motivation was ‘subconscious’. Acting ‘unconsciously’ means being self-pleasingly blind to his own motives.
Under Austen’s touch, the word is opening up to new possibilities. In her last completed novel, Persuasion, Captain Wentworth acknowledges this when, in the happy afterglow of declaring himself to Anne and being accepted, he explains his past behaviour to her. He tells her that, in the eight years since she was persuaded to reject his first proposal of marriage, ‘he had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally; that he had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done. He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry.’ His discovery and then his confession of his unconscious devotion to Anne are all the more convincing because the reader has watched and listened while his certain indifference reported early in the novel (‘Her power with him was gone for ever’) has been contradicted by all the signs of revivifying affection. Persuasion was published in 1818, a year after its author’s death, which happens to be the date of the first recorded use of ‘the unconscious’ (noun), by Coleridge, in some characteristically probing but perplexing lecture notes. ‘As in every work of Art the Conscious – is so impressed on the Unconscious, as to appear in it. So is the Man of Genius the Link that combines the two.’
‘Till this moment I never knew myself,’ Elizabeth Bennet cries, somewhat stagily, as she walks alone down a Kent lane. She has just been persuaded by Mr Darcy’s letter that Wickham is a charming rogue whose lies she has all too readily believed. Generations of sixth-formers have been taught that the heroine’s self-knowledge, quite as much as the Pemberley estate, is the prize she eventually gains. What is less often observed is the technical delicacy – unknown in fiction before her – with which Austen has dramatised Elizabeth’s ability to hide her feelings from herself. Think of the way Mr Darcy, having been repulsed in his two previous efforts to get her to dance with him, finally claims her as his partner. At the Netherfield ball our heroine has had to endure two clumsy turns of the floor with Mr Collins, before enjoying a dance with an unnamed officer who has conversed happily about Mr Wickham’s popularity among his fellow militia members. She is talking to Charlotte Lucas when she finds herself ‘suddenly addressed by Mr Darcy who took her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she did, she accepted him’. ‘Without knowing what she did’: the narrative behaves as if reporting a fact, but it is inhabiting her consciousness as her instant response to his ‘application’ is turned into a perplexing reflex. She is left ‘to fret over her own want of presence of mind’, and we sense the denial of feelings hidden from herself.
John Wiltshire’s finely observed study of Jane Austen’s six completed novels is all about the way she conjures characters’ hidden feelings. His title might lead you to expect some revelation of Austen’s private passions but, while knowledgable about her life, he devotes himself entirely to her novels. His title might also stir the expectation that the critic will be making explicit what the novelist herself strove to suppress, adding to those studies that have revealed Austen’s unacknowledged awareness of slavery, radical politics or masturbation. But Wiltshire is concerned, as he nicely puts it, with ‘the silences in the novels, not with the silences of the novels’. He reveals how artfully Austen uses silence, reticence and evasion. The hiddenness that he plumbs is contrived by the novelist. While he aims to show ‘how astonishing is Austen’s penetration of the hidden inner motives and impulses of her imagined characters’, this alone would hardly be news. The real point is to show the narrative techniques used to create, and often to withhold, these ‘inner motives’, giving the attentive reader the experience of inferring or discovering what can’t exactly be stated.
Wiltshire has written four books and many articles about Austen’s fiction, but he often seems to be discovering new things. This is as it should be, by his own argument, for ‘Austen readers tend to identify themselves as rereaders.’ Ever since George Henry Lewes, in his long and laudatory essay in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859, referred to those ‘like ourselves’ who ‘have read and reread her works’, rereading has been the declared pleasure of all Austen admirers. Lewes had counted his readings – ‘We have reread them all four times’ – and was ready to embark on another round. In their introduction to Emma in the Cambridge edition of the novels, Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan argue that Austen wrote for the rereader. In Emma she deliberately sacrificed ‘readability’ for the sake of a novel that ‘demanded repeated rereadings’. Wiltshire cites their argument that Emma, more than any other of her novels, offers the discerning reader the sharp pleasure of seeing what he or she has failed to discern on an earlier reading. So, for instance, the first-time reader will certainly recognise, through the fog of Emma’s misconceptions, that the smooth, ingratiating Mr Elton has his sights on our heroine (‘handsome, clever and rich’) and has no interest in her stupid, illegitimate stooge, Harriet Smith. Few uninformed readers, however, will grasp from the first what Frank Churchill is up to as he appears to flirt with Emma – how his very appearance in Highbury, after years of good excuses to his father, is tied to the arrival of Jane Fairfax at her aunt’s cramped home in the village. The delight of his scheming is available only to the rereader.
So much is ‘hidden’ by Austen, though invariably in plain sight. It was only on my own nth reading of Emma that I suddenly realised that Mr Perry the apothecary, reliable source of news and advice, and quoted so often by the novel’s main characters, never speaks in the novel. ‘Perry tells me ... ’, ‘Mr Perry said ... ’: he is always being cited, but Austen gives us not a word of his actual speech. Who knows what he says? Of course we don’t get any of his own words: his business is reflecting back the prejudices of his neurotic clients. No wonder he is doing so well (connoisseurs of Emma will know how much turns on his forthcoming purchase of a carriage – the surest sign of affluence in provincial Regency England). If I had read Mary Lascelles’s 1939 study Jane Austen and Her Art carefully enough I would have known about Perry’s silence already, but it seemed for a blissful moment as if the discovery was all mine, as if Austen had carefully folded the joke into the novel to delight someone who reread it long after her death.
Austen aficionados feel confident that when they go back to one of her novels, many such new discoveries await them. Wiltshire proceeds by close reading of particular passages, plenty of which reveal, even to the frequent rereader, narrative refinements that were hidden before. In my own favourite example, when Emma visits Mrs Bates’s home to find Frank Churchill mending her glasses, Wiltshire displays the clues that allow us to discover that Frank and Jane Fairfax have hastily rearranged themselves after an embrace. We are seeing with Emma’s eyes and so will probably miss these clues. Wiltshire supposes no end to such discoveries. In his chapter on Pride and Prejudice, he suggests that Austen encourages us to reread not only in the sense of going back to her novel, but in the sense of turning back to earlier pages during the course of a reading. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy are both in the habit of remembering, and sometimes quoting, what a person said earlier in the novel. ‘I do remember his boasting one day, at Netherfield, of the implacability of his resentments,’ Elizabeth tells Wickham, in reply to this pleasant deceiver’s account of his erstwhile patron’s ‘ill-temper’. But she remembers wrong. The reader who turns back a few chapters will find that Mr Darcy was attempting self-criticism in the face of her own playful mockery.
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Noticing and Not Noticing by John Mullan - Part 2
Letting your memory trick you is better than having no particular memory at all. Wickham and Lydia, with their shamefully cobbled together marriage, ‘seemed each of them to have the happiest memories in the world’. Wiltshire might have gone on to notice how brilliantly Austen allows many of her characters to forget what they have said before. Naturally there is Mrs Bennet, who manages effortlessly to turn from believing that Mr Darcy is ‘a most disagreeable, horrid man, not at all worth pleasing’ to as near the opposite as she can manage. ‘Such a charming man! – so handsome! so tall!’ Everyone notices this, but for Austen the pleasure must have been just as great in having Mrs Bennet announce with feeling in the second chapter that her neighbour Mrs Long ‘is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion of her’ and then, 52 chapters later, letting her tell her daughters: ‘I do think Mrs Long is as good a creature as ever lived.’ Naturally, she has excellent reasons for her opinion on each occasion. It is difficult not to think that we are all like Mrs Bennet in this respect, and Austen doesn’t restrict self-contradiction to fools and frauds. It is clever, truth-telling Elizabeth who responds to her mother’s advice not to dance with Mr Darcy by saying, with evident sincerity: ‘I believe, ma’am, I may safely promise you never to dance with him.’ And we know where that leads.
Nothing intrigues Austen more than self-deception. She is the most psychologically plausible of novelists largely because her characters’ dialogue is everywhere inflected by their concealed desires and misguided views of themselves. Wiltshire listens intently in order to marvel at the subtle ways in which such concealment reveals itself. He shows how Mrs Norris’s most unbelievable self-descriptions in Mansfield Park, and some of her cruellest cuts at Fanny, draw on the liturgy or the Bible, as if she ‘has only been able to access Christian idioms in a distorted form’. ‘I am sure I should be the last person in the world to withhold my mite upon such an occasion,’ she declares in the opening chapter, as she deftly ensures that she will incur no expense for the young Fanny’s move from her family home. ‘Wherever you are, you must be the lowest and last,’ she savagely tells Fanny years later, twisting a line from the Gospels. ‘Of course,’ the reader thinks, ‘I should have noticed this before.’ This is indeed how she speaks. She has been a vicar’s wife for many years and has a fund of what Wiltshire calls ‘debased and attenuated sanctimony’.
Austen, as we might say, has as much delight in conceiving a Mrs Norris as an Anne Elliot. Wiltshire devotes most of a chapter to Mrs Norris, fascinated by the creation of a character who is wonderfully absurd as well as nasty because ‘she believes what she proclaims, that she is a really good person.’ Austen is not much interested in hypocrites, the Blifils and Pecksniffs who spout of goodness but know in their hearts that it is all nonsense. There are a few self-knowing schemers among the minor characters: we are invited to imagine how Mr Shepherd, Sir Walter Elliot’s agent in Persuasion, might talk to his widowed daughter, Mrs Clay, when they are alone together. ‘Keep angling for him, my girl, and tickling his vanity, and you’ll get him in the end.’ Or something like that. But for the most part those who act badly still like to think well of themselves. Wiltshire gathers all the little suggestions that tell us of Mrs Norris’s wounded, angry psychopathology and let us believe that she believes herself.
Not all Austen’s fiction is so achieved. Wiltshire, like others before him, notices that in Northanger Abbey she can’t entirely trust to her characters. He isn’t completely charmed by the novel’s amused narrator, who is ‘sometimes more like a compère’. In Sense and Sensibility he points out that Austen compensates for her heroine’s frequent silences, her habitual refusal to express resentment or censure, with a narrative prose that is ‘unremittingly scarifying and judgmental’. He seems close to Lewes’s decisive judgment that ‘all her power is dramatic power; she loses her hold on us directly she ceases to speak through the personae.’ The term ‘free indirect style’ wasn’t available to Lewes to describe the fact that much of the third-person narration is also filtered through the consciousness of one or other of her characters. Wiltshire edited Mansfield Park (‘this magnificent novel’) for the Cambridge edition of Austen and is especially revealing on the way the technique, which hardly existed before Austen, is used here.
His treatment of Mansfield Park is alive to the moments at which the narrative picks up the rhythm of a character’s thoughts. He doesn’t say this, but many critics have failed to detect such rhythms at crucial moments and have thus misread the novel, confidently finding the author’s values where there are only a character’s sentiments. When Fanny is transplanted to the tumult of her family home in Portsmouth after eight years at Mansfield Park, the narrative reflects on the appeal of her adoptive home. ‘At Mansfield, no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence was ever heard.’ Yet the ‘desperate’ cadence of this lets us hear how Fanny ‘turns Mansfield into a fantasy world of comfort, even if it is only a comfort made out of negatives’. Sir Thomas hopes that a few months in her cramped and shabby Portsmouth quarters will make her appreciate his household, and therefore do as he wishes and marry Henry Crawford. She is duly appreciative, but the narrative that reports this mimics what Wiltshire calls ‘her nervous hysteria’. For chapter after chapter we have seen her scolded and tormented by Mrs Norris, but now, it seems, ‘the little irritations, sometimes introduced by aunt Norris, they were short, they were trifling, they were as a drop of water to the ocean, compared with the ceaseless tumult of her present abode.’ The stir of cliché and hyperbole is panicky Fanny, not sagacious Jane.
In Mansfield Park, of all Austen’s novels, the use of free indirect style is easiest to miss, partly because the heroine is apparently right-thinking, but more because of the way the narrative moves between characters: this is the Austen novel in which the heroine is most often absent. The Austen novel most dominated by its heroine’s point of view is, of course, Emma. Here free indirect style is used to render the protagonist’s deluded view of her little world, so the reader should always know to be suspicious of what he or she is being told. Despite this we keep being tricked. The narrator follows so closely the progress of the heroine’s attention that all the clues as to characters’ real motives can as easily be missed by the reader as they have been by Emma herself. Wiltshire points at an innocuous few sentences describing the Coles’s ‘rather large’ – for which read, anxiously ostentatious – dinner party, at which Emma thinks Frank Churchill seems to be expressing his amorous interest in her. Distracted by Mrs Weston, she loses sight of him for a while, until she finds Mr Cole entreating her to play his new piano; Frank, who ‘had found a seat by Miss Fairfax’, adds his own ‘very pressing entreaties’. He is in fact using the gathering to find a precious moment or two of closeness to Jane Fairfax. Much of the time he can only exchange looks with her. But, as Wiltshire observes, the clue is ‘slipped into a sentence shaped as if to appear to reaffirm Frank’s courtship of Emma’.
The reader’s attention is minutely rewarded. You can do this sort of thing with any paragraph of Emma. As Wiltshire says, it’s ‘a novel that manages the reader’s own attention in extraordinary ways’. Emma is busily noticing things and not noticing things, and the reader has the chance to share what she notices and to notice what she doesn’t. In life more than one thing is happening at any given moment, and Wiltshire thinks Emma is the English novel that comes closest to representing this. Conventionally enough, he comes to Persuasion last and finds an audaciously different focus on the heroine’s consciousness. After the opening few chapters, we are almost always in Anne Elliot’s head, and because of this we often hear only ‘patches or fragments of conversations’ – not just because she is marginalised by the other characters, but also because, as Wiltshire puts it, ‘her own feelings impede or intercept the incoming communications.’ Anne is always ‘keeping her thoughts to herself’, Wiltshire says – I would say keeping them from herself too. Certainly he is right that the novel’s technical brilliance partly consists of the narrator’s keeping these thoughts from the reader, thus building up ‘a kind of bank, or freight, of painful, unexpressed experience and emotion’.
The last time I read the novel I noticed for the first time a tiny detail that Wiltshire highlights. We are being told that Anne, condemned to play the Musgroves’ grand piano while others dance or talk, is used to giving pleasure only to herself. The fond, tasteless Musgrove parents listen only to their daughters’ playing, even though Anne plays much better. ‘Excepting one short period of her life, she had never, since the age of 14, never since the loss of her dear mother, known the happiness of being listened to, or encouraged by any just appreciation or real taste.’ It is easy to be distracted by that surprising mention of her mother (so rarely explicitly in her thoughts) and not to register the opening phrase. As soon as you notice it you know what it means: it echoes that ‘short period of exquisite felicity’ mentioned several chapters earlier, the period of her courtship by Captain Wentworth, before she was persuaded to turn him away. Of course: she must have played to him. But the inexplicit, almost evasive, reference to this is beautifully unclear because it dramatises Anne’s own thinking. She will hardly allow herself to remember that period. Wiltshire alerts us even to ‘the minuscule pause before the repeated “never” (which a lesser writer might have written “never, never”) giving the reader a momentary glimpse of her past happiness with Wentworth, and suggesting the depressive process by which one re-experienced grief drags another in its train’. Old critical hand that he may be, he almost applauds the sheer technical dexterity, which means that, after a decent pause, he will be able to reread those novels. Like her other admirers he will read again, and read her better.
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In November 1894 Henry James set down in his notebooks an outline for the novel that, eight years later, became The Wings of the Dove. He wrote about a heroine who was dying but in love with life. ‘She is equally pathetic in her doom and in her horror of it. If she only could live just a little; just a little more – just a little longer.’ James also had in mind a young man who ‘wishes he could make her taste of happiness, give her something that it breaks her heart to go without having known. That “something” can only be – of course – the chance to love and to be loved.’ He outlined the position of another woman to whom the man was ‘otherwise attached and committed ... It appears inevitably, or necessarily, preliminary that his encounter with the tragic girl shall be through the other woman.’ He also saw the reason why the young man and the woman to whom he was committed could not marry. ‘They are obliged to wait ... He has no income and she no fortune, or there is some insurmountable opposition on the part of her father. Her father, her family, have reasons for disliking the young man.’ This idea of the dying young woman and the penniless young man, on the one hand, and, on the other, the young woman with no fortune and an obstinate father circled in James’s fertile mind. In his conception of the book, there was no moment, it seemed, in which the second young woman would have a mother; it was ‘her father, her family’ who would oppose the marriage; over the next five or six years James would work out the form this opposition would take, and who exactly ‘her family’ would be.
In Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748-1818, Ruth Perry examined the make-up of the family in the early years of the novel. ‘Despite the emphasis on marriage and motherhood in late 18th-century society,’ she writes,
mothers in novels of the period are notoriously absent – dead or otherwise missing. Just when motherhood was becoming central to the definition of femininity, when the modern conception of the all-nurturing, tender, soothing, ministering mother was being consolidated in English culture, she was being represented in fiction as a memory rather than as an active present reality.
The idea of the family as broken or disturbed, and the idea of the heroine as oddly alone or controlled and managed, are central to 19th and early 20th-century fiction. If the heroine and the narrative itself are seeking completion in her marriage, then the journey there involves either the search for support from figures outside the immediate family, or the escape from members of the family who seek to constrain her. To become part of a new family with her marriage, the heroine needs to redefine her own family or usurp its power. The novel in English during the 19th century is full of parents whose influence must be evaded or erased, to be replaced by figures who operate either literally or figuratively as aunts, both kind and mean, both well-intentioned and duplicitous, both rescuing and destroying. The novel is a form for orphans, or for those whose orphanhood is all the more powerful for being figurative, or open to the suggestion, both sweet and sour, of surrogate parents.
It is easy to attribute the absence of mothers in novels of the 18th and 19th centuries to the large number of women who died in childbirth, at least 10 per cent in the 18th century. The first wives of three of Austen’s brothers died this way, leaving motherless children. But this explanation is too easy. If it had suited novelists to fill their books with living mothers they would have done so – after all, Austen’s own mother outlived her. In Novel Relations, Perry suggests that the motherless heroines of the 18th-century novel – and all the play with substitutes and surrogates – derive from a ‘new necessity in an age of intensifying individualism’. The necessity was to separate oneself from one’s mother, or destroy her, at least symbolically, and replace her with a mother figure of one’s choosing. ‘This mother who is also a stranger,’ Perry writes, ‘may thus enable the heroine’s independent moral existence.’
Mothers get in the way in fiction: they take up space that is better occupied by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality, and – as the novel itself develops – by the idea of solitude. It becomes important to the novel that its key scenes should occur when the heroine is alone, with no one to protect her, no one to confide in, no possibility of advice. Her thoughts move inward, offering a drama not between generations, or between opinions, but within a wounded, deceived or conflicted self. The presence of a mother would breach the essential privacy of the emerging self, the uncertain moral consciousness on which the novel comes to depend. The conspiracy in the novel is not between a mother and her daughter, but between the protagonist and the reader, who watches her mind at work.
Austen’s last three novels all have motherless heroines. Austen doesn’t allow this to be dwelled on. Motherlessness is used instead to increase the heroine’s sense of self: it allows her personality to emerge more intensely in the narrative, as though slowly filling space which had been secretly left for that purpose. There is a mother in Pride and Prejudice, but there are also two aunts: Elizabeth Bennet’s Aunt Gardiner and Mr Darcy’s aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh. It is an aspect of Austen’s genius that, while the novel negates the power and influence of Elizabeth’s mother, neutralises her by being both comic and blunt, the two aunts are painted in considerably different shades, one allowed a calm, civilising subtlety, the other a histrionic sense of entitlement. They also represent a changing England.
Aunt Gardiner’s husband, who was Mrs Bennet’s brother, lived from trade. He was, we are told, ‘greatly superior to his sister as well by nature as education’ and it is pointed out that the Netherfield ladies, Mr Bingley’s sisters, superior and snobbish and alert to class difference, ‘would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so well bred and agreeable’. His wife ‘was an amiable, intelligent, elegant woman, and a great favourite with all her ... nieces. Between the two eldest and herself especially, there subsisted a very particular regard.’ It is to her house in London that the sisters repair in that hushed interregnum when both Bingley and Darcy have disappeared and with them the prospects for Jane; and it is while travelling with her aunt and uncle that Elizabeth renews her relations with Darcy. It is through them that she discovers that Darcy has rescued her sister Lydia. In other words, they offer stillness, unforced opportunity, vital information – none of which is available from the girls’ mother, or indeed their father. This idea that the sisters have to be removed from the family home for the novel to proceed makes the role of their uncle and aunt essential in the book.
Austen feels free, on the other hand, to make Lady Catherine de Bourgh both imperious and comic, her wealth and power serving to make her ridiculous rather than impressive; but she is not meant merely to amuse us, or to show us an aspect of English society that Austen thought was foolish. She is an aunt who does not prevail; her presence in the book succeeds in making Darcy more individual, less part of any system. Her function is to allow her nephew, who refuses to obey her, a sort of freedom, a way of standing alone that will make him worthy of Elizabeth; and worthy, too, of the novel’s moral trajectory, which moves away from blood and inheritance and privileges instead the autonomous and personal. It is a trajectory that will become increasingly important in English life as the 19th century proceeds.
Austen understood the strange, fluid dynamic of an extended family. In her own family, both Jane and her sister Cassandra, as Marilyn Butler has pointed out, ‘played a key role as travellers between the households [of their brothers] and assiduous correspondents ... Jane somewhat closer to and more preoccupied with two of the younger brothers – Henry, said to have been her favourite, who lived in London, and the sailor Frank, who reported to her from various war fronts ... The sisters made good aunts and friends to the next generation.’ Austen cared for some of her nieces and nephews after their mothers died, and seems to have been remembered fondly by all of them. When one niece herself became an aunt Austen wrote to her: ‘Now that you are become an Aunt, you are a person of some consequence & must excite great Interest whatever You do. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible, & I am sure of your doing the same now.’ Austen also lived in the hope of an inheritance from her mother’s brother, Mr Leigh-Perrot, who was married and lived in Bath. The Leigh-Perrots were childless and not amusing, but they had to be kept sweet. (Her uncle’s will, which in 1817 left Austen and her siblings £1000 after their aunt’s death, did not help Austen as she herself was ill and died soon afterwards.)
Since two of Austen’s brothers, Frank and Charles, went to sea and were away from home for long periods of time, it is easy to see the tender and constant feelings which Fanny Price in Mansfield Park has for her brother William, also away at sea, as being a fundamental part of Austen’s emotional world. The novel begins by breaking a family, by taking Fanny from her own impoverished family and handing her over, almost as a changeling, to the care of her two aunts. The fact that she is penniless leaves her unprotected and requires timidity, passivity. Since the opening of the novel has all the characteristics of a fairy tale, Austen must have been tempted to make Lady Bertram, the aunt in whose house Fanny will live, an evil ogre and to make Mrs Norris, the aunt who lives nearby, the kind and watchful one. Or to make them both ogres. What she decided to do was to hand all the badness to Mrs Norris. It is Mrs Norris who makes very plain to Fanny her precarious position as someone who is enough a part of the family to be given shelter but enough of an outsider to be regularly insulted. When Fanny refuses to take part in the family theatricals, Mrs Norris says: ‘I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl, if she does not do what her aunt and cousins wish her – very ungrateful indeed, considering who and what she is.’
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The reader is invited, then, to dislike Mrs Norris for her cruelty and to admire Fanny for her forbearance. Austen’s biographer Claire Tomalin sees Mrs Norris as ‘one of the great villains of literature’; Tony Tanner thought she was ‘one of Jane Austen’s most impressive creations and indeed one of the most plausibly odious characters in fiction’. All this is clear, at times rather too clear. What is not clear is what the reader should feel about the other aunt, Lady Bertram, the mistress of Mansfield Park. Tomalin dislikes her. ‘Fanny’s experience at Mansfield Park is bitter as no other childhood is in Austen’s work. Her aunt, Lady Bertram, is virtually an imbecile; she may be a comic character, and not ill-tempered, but the effects of her extreme placidity are not comic.’ Tanner takes a similar view: Lady Bertram, he writes,
is utterly inert, unaware, and entirely incapable of volition, effort or independent judgment. She is of course an immensely amusing character; but she also reveals the Mansfield values run to seed. In effect, she never thinks, moves, or cares: amiable enough in that she is not malicious, she is, in her insentient indolence, useless as a guardian of Mansfield Park and positively culpable as a parent. And it is her sofa-bound inertia which permits the ascendancy of Mrs Norris. Lady Bertram does not represent quietness and repose so much as indifference and collapse.
Lionel Trilling has another reading, claiming that Lady Bertram is a self-mocking representation of Austen’s wish to ‘be rich and fat and smooth and dull ... to sit on a cushion, to be a creature of habit and an object of ritual deference’.
It is, however, possible to argue that rather than being merely a piece of self-mockery, Lady Bertram is one of Austen’s most subtle, restrained and ingenious creations. The novel, after all, is not a moral fable or parable; it is not our job to like or dislike characters in fiction, or make judgments about their worth, or learn from them how to live. We can do that with real people and, if we like, figures from history. They are for moralists to feast on. A novel is a pattern and it is our job to notice how the textures were woven and the tones put in place. This is not to insist that a character in fiction is merely a verbal construct and bears no relation to the known world. It is rather to suggest that the role of a character in a novel is never simple. A novel isn’t a piece of ethics or sociology. It is a release of certain energies and a dramatisation of how these energies might be controlled and given shape. Characters in fiction are determined by the pattern, and they determine the pattern in turn.
Lady Bertram in this context is easy to read; her role in the pattern of Mansfield Park is obvious. She is not good, she performs no good or kind act that matters; nor is she bad, since she performs no bad act that matters either. But she is there in the book, in the house, in the family. Fanny has already lost one mother, who has effectively given her away. Aunt Norris plays the role of the wicked aunt who appears now and then. Lady Bertram has four children of her own, and with the arrival of Fanny, she effectively acquires a fifth. Austen now has a problem. If she makes Lady Bertram merely unpleasant, Fanny will have to respond to her unpleasantness in scene after scene, because Lady Bertram is, unusually, an aunt in residence rather than an aunt who comes and goes. This will then become the story of the book: a simple story of cruelty and resistance to cruelty. And if Lady Bertram is actively cruel to Fanny, how will she treat her own children? If she treats them with kindness, then the intensity of their agency will be diluted and dissolved. If she is cruel to them too, then the singleness of Fanny, her solitude as a force in the book, will not emerge.
It would really make sense to kill Lady Bertram, or to have her not be there, allow her to be one of those unmentioned mothers in fiction, an unpalpable absence. But in that case, Fanny wouldn’t join her household and would miss daily contact with Edmund, who notices her and then doesn’t, releasing an important dramatic energy into the book. So Austen has to have Lady Bertram be there and not there at the very same time; she has to give her characteristics which are essentially neutral. Since her husband is away so much, and her children are there with her, as are her sister and her niece, it must have been tempting to allow her to have some role, to be silly or irritating or amusing like Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. But Austen has the ingenious idea of making the sofa, rather than the household, the realm over which Lady Bertram reigns, and making sleep, or half-sleep, her dynamic. She is too sleepy to care. When her husband is leaving for the West Indies, Austen writes: ‘Lady Bertram did not at all like to have her husband leave her; but she was not disturbed by any alarm for his safety, or solicitude for his comfort, being one of those persons who think nothing can be dangerous or difficult, or fatiguing to any body but themselves.’ She thinks about her own comfort but she does not dwell too much on the subject. It defines what she does not do rather than any of her actions. In fact, she hardly acts at all: ‘Lady Bertram did not go into public with her daughters. She was too indolent even to accept a mother’s gratification in witnessing their success and enjoyment at the expense of any personal trouble.’ She doesn’t merely ignore others, but most of the time ignores herself: she lives a gloriously underexamined life.
All this places Lady Bertram at precisely the opposite pole from Fanny, who notices herself with considerable, almost intrusive care, as though she were a little orphan novelist. Lady Bertram’s non-being, her presence as outline rather than line, her sheer inertia, her belief in the power of her own placid beauty: all these things allow other forces in the novel – the venality of some of her children, Edmund’s sincerity – to have their effect organically, because of the characters’ own natural will, not because of their mother or family or even in spite of their mother or family. And in the centre of the book stands a strange and insistent mass: the consciousness of Fanny Price. She has no vivacity, no wit; she is mainly silent. She repels as much as she attracts. Trilling dislikes her, as many do: ‘Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park. Fanny Price is overtly virtuous and consciously virtuous.’ This may be so, if we insist on looking at her from the outside as though she were human. What is more important is that the novel reflects her essence. She has a way of noticing and registering which has nothing to do with virtue, but everything to do with the novel’s pattern. Her uncertainty, and our uncertainty about how she will live, is what gives the book its strangely powerful momentum.
The novel, as a form, is unsure whether it is a story, told by a single teller, or a play enacted by a number of actors. It is both static and theatrical in its systems, a sphere in which a single controlling voice operates, or many competing voices. And since the novel is made up not of characters moving across the stage wearing colourful costumes and projecting their voices, but grim black marks on the page, one of the other purposes of aunts is that they allow for dramatic entrances and departures. All through the 19th century, aunts breach the peace and lighten the load. The departure of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, for example, is tremendously exciting. ‘I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.’ Or the departure of Mrs Glegg in The Mill on the Floss, a book which includes a chapter entitled ‘Enter the Aunts and Uncles’, as though the page of the novel were a stage in the theatre: ‘“Well!” said Mrs Glegg, rising from her chair. “I don’t know whether you think it’s a fine thing to sit by and hear me swore at, Mr Glegg, but I’m not going to stay a minute longer in this house.”’ Or the row half a century later between Stephen’s father and his Aunt Dante on Christmas Day in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkin ring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easychair. Mr Dedalus rose quickly and followed her towards the door. At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage.’ Thus aunts depart in novels as aunts arrive, changing everything.
Of all novelists, the one who comes most to mistrust the mother and make use of the aunt is Henry James. In his critical writings, his prefaces and letters, James wrote very little about Austen. Early on he made his admiration clear: ‘Miss Austen,’ he wrote, ‘in her best novels, is interesting to the last page; the tissue of her narrative is always close and firm, and though she is minute and analytical, she is never prolix or redundant.’ But he also wrote: ‘Jane Austen, with all her light felicity, leaves us hardly more curious of her process, or of the experience in her that fed it, than the brown thrush who tells his story from the garden bough.’ He alluded sarcastically to ‘the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines, who have found their “dear”, our dear, everybody’s dear, Jane so infinitely to their material purpose’. There are many ways of reading this, but it should be noted that James was not, in general, in the habit of praising other novelists; he saw his own work as a deeply self-conscious art, refined into a system, an exquisite tapestry. He did not notice anyone else working with his intensity and degree of deliberation. But he took what he needed, as any novelist does, from his colleagues’ work, and in his creation of aunts, in that fictional space where things move unexpectedly within the pattern, where there is much ambiguity and ambivalence, James took his bearings from Austen.
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(Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said.
Chatto, 444 pp., £20, February 1993, 0 7011 3808 4
The Foundation of Empire is Art and Science. Remove them or Degrade them and the Empire is no more. Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.)
William Blake, ‘Annotations to Reynolds’
Blake’s famous remark in the margins of Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art has always mystified me. How could Blake, the fierce ‘prophet against empire’, name his own beloved vocation of ‘Art and Science’ as the foundation of empire? Blake promises that when ‘sweet Science reigns’ and the prophetic artist’s work is done, ‘Empire [will be] no more/And now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.’ Was Blake merely reacting to Reynolds’s complacent and highly traditional notion that ‘art follows empire,’ serving it as mere ideological ornament, or at best as a moral allegory designed to flatter the exercisers of power, or as a sensuous diversion from the ennui of domination and conquest? Is Blake arguing that art, which looks parasitical on empire, is actually foundational? Could culture as such be the foundation of empire, forming the structures of feeling that make a people desire colonial conquest and domination and endure the sacrifices required for them? Or is there a more subversive suggestion that parasitical forms of ‘art and science’ must in some sense be ‘degraded’ and ‘removed’ in order to smash imperialism? Are not Blake’s own works of ‘art and science’, his illuminated books, a kind of de-graded art, hybrid, impure, heterogeneous, visionary, obscene, dangerous, self-contradictory, chaotic?
Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism cites Blake’s remark in its early pages in order to mediate an assertion and a denial. The assertion is that culture is a crucial factor in the desire to found and maintain imperial regimes; the denial is that this fact necessitates a ‘wholesale condemnation’ of culture, a ‘rhetoric of blame’ that reduces works of art (or science) to mere instruments of political domination. Said insists throughout his book on his aesthetic conservatism, his respect for the ‘autonomy’ of artistic values. Yet what can mediate or reconcile the assertion and the denial? Perhaps nothing but a carefully measured ‘de-gradation’ of a mystified conception of art, ‘which we have tended to sanities as a realm of unchanging intellectual monuments, free from worldly affiliations’. To de-grade in this sense is to de-sanities, to engage in a realistic, critical, worldly act of reading and interpretation. It is to confront, not only the historical, worldly situation of texts and images, but the situation of the interpreter, the scene of interpretation and the audience that it addresses. It is, in short, to uphold the tradition of the public intellectual, the social critic willing to address the full range of ethical, political issues and to connect them to the richest examples of cultural expression, the arts and sciences. If Said’s Orientalism provided the critical de-gradation of imperial sciences – the learned disciplines that constructed an Arabic ‘Other’ for an equally reified ‘Western Civilisation’ in modern Europe – Culture and Imperialism takes on an even more difficult and subtle task with the imperial arts. If it is relatively clear how historians, social scientists, demographers, anthropologists and colonial administrators deployed their ‘sciences’ to dominate subject peoples, it is considerably less clear how Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park can be seen as a cultural ‘foundation’ for imperialism. Surely a handful of references to a plantation in Antigua in a novel that otherwise seems totally insular is insufficient evidence for any such claim. Surely Mansfield Park is merely displaying a few symptoms, incidental traces of a historical reality in which it has no real interest.
The choice of Mansfield Park (and of Jane Austen) as Said’s opening literary example is a way of forcing this issue into the open. The canonical reading of Jane Austen as unworldly, uninterested in history, fixated on private, domestic, ‘feminine’ issues, typifies the sort of ‘sanitised’ and monumental view of literature Said wants to criticise. To de-grade Austen is to open her text onto its world of real, historical reference, to see her narrative as unfolding a relation between domestic, private domination and slavery abroad. It is not, Said insists, to turn Austen into an ‘imperialist stooge’, nor to see her novel as causing or responsible for the degradation and violence of British colonial policies. But it is to see her narrative as the complex articulation of a structure of feeling that makes imperialism seem natural, inevitable, so foundational to everyday life that it can be taken for granted. To de-grade Austen is to show how the British could acquire their empire ‘absentmindedly’, to show what sort of culture could sustain a system of global and domestic domination and could represent it to itself as morally enlightened and politically just. Austen’s art, in short, is a representation of a real cultural system in all its richness and detail. It is also a force for the reproduction of that system, and an occasion for its critical de-gradation and de-sanitisation, not (Said insists) for ‘blame’.
But how can blame and degradation be kept distinct? Perhaps they cannot, at least not in any systematic way. Perhaps they can only be divided strategically, rhetorically, as a matter of improvisation and practical criticism, not as a matter of pure principle or theory. Perhaps the only recourse is a critical practice that risks polemical engagements, provisional tactics, unresolved contradictions, the defacement of literary monuments and the cultural verities they express. The acceptance of these risks is what makes Culture and Imperialism a great and flawed book – great in its scope, intellectual energy, learning and critical passion, flawed in its excesses and repetitions, its drastic swings of tone, its unevenness in conception and execution.
And yet I think it could not have been otherwise, given the topic, the author, the historical situation. One’s editorial finger may occasionally itch for a blue pencil, but one’s readerly eye wants to remark, to annotate, to remember and reflect on the literally thousands of insights into the relation of culture and imperialism that this book offers. Culture and Imperialism provides a profound, comprehensive and brilliantly detailed account of its topic. If one had to rely on any single source-book about imperial culture, it would certainly be this encyclopedic study, which touches on practically every significant imperial venture in modern European history, and focuses with unprecedented subtlety on the 19th-century elaboration of French and British colonial systems, moving across the spectrum of cultural production from novels to poetry to opera to contemporary mass media. The general reader who wants this to be the only book he reads about imperialism may find some of the reading lists excessive, but the scholar will find them indispensable guides to the vast literature on imperialism that Said has at his fingertips.
The importance of Culture and Imperialism, however, is not simply the encyclopedic range of overlapping narratives and territories that take the reader around the entire globe through two centuries of imperial history. Equally important is what I can only describe as Said’s vulnerability to his subject, his refusal to master his topic with theories or narratives, his sense of incompleteness, of unsolved (even unsolvable) problems, of utopian alternatives, modest practical strategies, frustrated hopes and tragic mistakes.
Said writes at the end of what is now (over-optimistically) being called the ‘post-colonial’ era, the period – roughly since World War Two, in which the direct political administration of Third World countries by European colonial powers has apparently come to an end. And yet he also writes at a moment when national struggles of liberation from colonialism seem to be dissolving into ferocious forms of state terrorism, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and religious fundamentalism. He writes at a time when his adopted home country, the United States, has emerged as the undisputed heir to the crown of imperial dominatrix, when there is no longer an ‘Evil Empire’ to provide a kind of global moral allegory. The imperial stage is now the scene of a Pax Americana, one that teaches the world to sing in the perfect harmony of international corporate culture, while dispatching its smart bombs to surgically cleanse ‘trouble spots’. It is not all that clear whether the present era is to be seen as the final death-throes of imperialism, or as the moment when a new, more virulent, subtle and all encompassing form of economic neo-colonialism (complete with rapid-strike forces) is about to assume global dominance.
Said writes from a situation, in short, where the grand modernist hopes for de-colonisation and nationalist liberation, the prophetic and utopian accents of great public intellectuals like Fanon, have been betrayed by the likes of Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein. The masterly narratives of the public intellectuals have been replaced by less ambitious, more narrowly professional and academic ‘studies’ of empire. Said writes as a professional scholar at the end of a great age of cultural theorising and historical revisionism called ‘Post-Modernism’, yet he is relentlessly critical of professional, academic criticism, scornful of esoteric theory (even as he builds on its insights) and hopelessly nostalgic for the heroic age of public criticism when the kind of global study he wants could be realised.
Said has, in effect, attempted to write an impossible book for an impossible age, a book that would negotiate the contradictions between global scope and particular detail, master narratives and local histories, encyclopedic scholarly learning and a popular, public form of critical engagement. His description of the ‘peculiarities’ of Verdi’s Aïda (another flawed masterpiece) could easily be applied to his own book: ‘like the opera form itself, [it] is a hybrid, radically impure work that belongs equally to the history of culture and the historical experience of overseas domination. It is a composite work, built around disparities and discrepancies that have been either ignored or unexplored, that can be recalled and mapped descriptively; they are interesting in and of themselves, and they make more sense of [its] unevenness, its anomalies, its restrictions and silences, than analyses of the kind that focus on ... European culture exclusively.’
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The ‘unevenness’ of Culture and Imperialism is partly a matter of the heterogeneous kinds of writing it deploys. Angry political polemic jostles against close, loving, formal analysis of aesthetic objects. Detailed historical interpretations of individual texts butt into philosophical reflections on the basic metalanguages of imperialism and culture. Broad historical strokes survey European imperial culture through its three major phases: the heroic, confident era of 19th-century Romanticism and Realism; the ‘ironic’ era of Modernism and resistance struggle; the irresolution and confusion of the post-modern, post-colonial era which we now inhabit. Yet this generalised story is continually complicated and undermined by a sense of local exigencies, cultural specificity and discrepant rates of historical development. At the very moment that Post-Modernism seems the cultural dominant of the New World Order, Arab intellectuals ‘are still concerned with modernity itself, still far from exhausted, still a major challenge in a culture dominated by turath (heritage) and orthodoxy’. Nor is this simply a question of the Third World ‘catching up’ on a single, homogeneous time-line to a prefabricated modernity, but a complex issue of re-functioning, translation and appropriation. The post-colonial ‘modernities’ of Iraq, Egypt, China, India have to be seen as distinct from one another, and from their Western ‘models’; at the same time their relations and common features must be mapped.
The tensions, contradictions and unresolved oppositions in Culture and Imperialism are not, then, straightforward ‘flaws’ in Said’s argument or method, but necessary consequences of his own historical position as a hybrid intellectual, mediating professional and public criticism, theory and history, aesthetic formalism and ethical engagement, cosmopolitan centrality and the marginality of the Palestinian exile. The flaws are also directly traceable to a deeply confused historical situation, ‘a period of vast uncertainty’ that resists master-narratives and totalising theories and permits only the formation of tactical, provisional cultural maps and contrapuntal narratives.
In this spirit, I want to offer a kind of secondary map of Culture and Imperialism that distinguishes three different forms of more or less necessary contradiction in Said’s argument. The first might be called the political, which animates the basic polemic of the book, its attack on such straightforward antagonists as imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, nativism and fanatical forms of religious or racial sectarianism. Arrayed against these forces (which have themselves been historically opposed at various moments, as in the conflict between nativist, religious, nationalist movements and imperial domination), Said traces a history of secular resistance to empire that goes well beyond the nationalist tendency to simply replicate and ‘nativise’ forms of imperial domination. This tradition stresses critical, emancipatory, dialectical notions of resistance, and is located by Said principally in the examples of Franz Fanon and C.L.R. James. When Said remarked at a conference in Chicago some time ago that he wanted to establish a Palestinian state so that he could critically attack it, he articulated the basic impulse that holds him back from one-sided polemic, and forestalls the sort of intellectual paralysis that can be brought about by simple oppositions – between imperialism and nationalism, between internationalist and nativist perspectives. Said’s political polemic is, in short, thoroughly dialectical (though not Hegelian) in its structure, consistently refusing static divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
The second form of contradiction in Said’s argument might be called cultural/methodological. It deploys such oppositions as the religious and the secular; theoretical totalities and pluralistic strategies of critical practice; linear, narrative time and contrapuntal constructions of space. ‘The inherent mode’ for Said’s ‘contrapuntal method’ is, as he insists, ‘not temporal but spatial’. Following Gramsci, he clearly privileges the spatial categories of geography, landscape, place and terrain over the temporal categories that have dominated both Hegelian/Marxist and bourgeois historiography.
Said does not, however, regard narrative time as irrelevant to history. His argument is rather that the tendency of time-logic is to homogenise historical events and cultural phenomena, to reduce their significance to positions in a linear chain of cause and effect and to refer all final significance to a quasi-religious and totalising eschatology, a ‘goal’ of history, a resolution to the master-narrative. Temporality finally recuperates a spatial perspective by constructing what Said calls ‘a Western super-subject’ who treats ‘the whole of world history as viewable’. Thus, theory, religion and temporality collude at the level of explanatory method to reproduce the very cultural and political totalities and essences that require deconstructing in the first place.
The categories of space, by contrast, focus attention on the concrete boundaries and material formations of social relationships. They reveal these borders functioning simultaneously as barriers between peoples and as connecting links, as constructions of both culture (narratives, representations, discourses) and physical technologies (ships, weapons, systems of commerce). By starting from the real world map of imperial domination, Said is able to perform a global critique that is not totalising, and produce what he calls ‘overlapping narratives’ that are (following the tradition of Vico, Rousseau, Herder and the brothers Schlegel) secular, not eschatological, in their claims.
Said’s third form of contradiction is the most fundamental, and is indicated in the very terms of his study, culture/imperialism. Perhaps most telling is his decision to connect these terms with the ambiguous metonymic conjunction ‘and’, instead of tethering them with a hierarchical ‘of’, or the metaphorical evasions of ‘as’. Certainly this book has much to say on ‘culture as imperialism’, the ‘imperialism of culture’, and vice versa. But it steadfastly refuses formulations that make one term the cause, the other the effect. At the same time, it resists the temptation (implicit in ‘and’) to flatten out or erase the disjunctions and conflicts between culture and imperialism. After all, these things refer on the one hand to things like ‘art and science’ – novels, poems, paintings, learned professions, media of communication, and on the other to things like armies, bureaucracies, weapons and systems of communication.
As these two lists suggest, some cultural items (novels and poems, for instance) seem to stand at a considerable distance from the political realities of empire, others (media and communication systems) seem to touch them quite directly. Culture and imperialism must be read, then, as a form of global mapping that insists simultaneously on disjunctions and conjunctions of the aesthetic and the political. That is why Said can seem to engage in a ‘de-grading’ critique of apparently ‘innocent’ novels like Mansfield Park while at the same time insisting that he remains ‘as conservative as anyone when it comes to, if not the redemptive value of reading a classic ... the potential enhancement of one’s sensibility and consciousness by doing so’. It is why he can invoke as the literary pole-stars of his notion of culture the contrary figures of Blake and T.S. Eliot. Even as Said rejects Eliot’s idealism, Eliot remains the guardian of a sense of relatively autonomous cultural tradition that is inescapably spatial and multi-directional, a model for the spatial poetics of Said’s own book. Blake, by contrast, is the English poet Eliot notoriously charged with ‘meanness of culture’. Blake dared to suggest that ‘it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars’, and that ‘the Foundation of Empire is Art and Science’. Said’s negotiation of these fearful contraries is what makes Culture and Imperialism a brilliant, courageous and necessary book, a far-flung empire of learning in its own right.
I am not suggesting, however, that Said has successfully finessed every conflict or teased out every contradiction into its dialectical resolution. Two issues, one of exclusion, the other of ambivalence, seem to me fundamentally unresolved. The exclusion is expressed in Said’s unswerving allegiance to what he calls ‘secular’ criticism, as opposed to religious hermeneutics and ‘theocratic’ alternatives to imperialism. Said tells an anecdote of a lecture in Cairo in which he is literally unable to hear a young woman wearing a veil asking about the ‘theocratic alternative’: ‘I had overlooked her concerns in my anti-clerical and secular zeal. (I nevertheless proceeded boldly to my attack!)’ One can certainly understand Said’s negative feelings about religious forms of resistance to imperialism, given his position between the Scylla and Charybdis of Zionism and Islamic fundamentalism. And yet the role of religious opposition to empire cannot be ignored, whether in such phenomena as the Abolitionist Movement, or the anti-colonialist claims of Zionism and Islamic revolutions. Said also seems fully aware that the foundations for his own ‘secular’ alternative, the great legitimating narratives of Enlightenment and modernity, have been thoroughly shaken in the post-modern era. If the ‘secular alternative’ involves faith in enlightened critical reason and Enlightenment notions of emancipation and historical progress, one has to ask what grounds there are for optimism in this quarter, since Said’s own history of modern European imperialism has shown it to be much more a product of secular than theocratic alternatives.
The ambivalence surfaces most clearly in Said’s performance of his hybrid role as professional and public critic. One of his characteristic polemical gestures is the claim that ‘professionalism’ has destroyed a sense of ‘vocation’: ‘Policy-oriented intellectuals have internalised the norms of the state ... and intellectuals whose charge includes values and principles – literary, philosophical, historical specialists – the American university has defanged them. Jargons of almost unimaginable rebarbativeness dominate their styles. Cults like Post-Modernism, discourse analysis. New Historicism, deconstruction, neo-pragmatism transport them into the country of the blue.’
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Let’s lay aside for the moment the fact that the distinction between ‘profession’ and ‘vocation’ is rooted in the very difference between ‘secular’ and ‘theocentric’ spheres that Said has invoked, and that a sense of ‘religious vocation’ is one traditional grounding for ethical, political and even professional commitments. Anti-professionalism is an attractive and highly traditional stance for a ‘public’ critic to assume (especially in the US, where it feeds on a long tradition of populist anti-intellectualism) but it strikes me as far too easy, especially for a critic whose work owes so much to the critical movements he dismisses. Culture and Imperialism is itself a ‘Post-Modern’ text in its formal heterogeneity; the analysis of ‘discourse’ as a form of power is central to its project; its contrapuntal strategies of spatial and temporal juxtaposition are not so unlike recent work in New Historicism; its allegiance to a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ and what I have called a ‘de-grading’ or de-sanitising critical mode connect it inevitably to deconstruction; and its resolute rejection of theory and master-narratives give it an unavoidable relation to pragmatism. My sense is that Said has serious critical disputes with each of these movements, but the journalistic stereotype of ‘cults’, ‘jargon’, and ‘professionalism’ prevents him from real intellectual engagement with them. Instead he settles for a rhetoric that sounds more like Lynne Cheney or Hilton Kramer than himself.
The received idea that there are no more great public intellectuals, that academic professionalism has destroyed the critical vocation, is belied by a host of contemporary figures and movements, from Foucault to feminism, many of them gathered in Said’s own pages. (For more on this, see my essay, ‘The Golden Age of Criticism’ in these pages, 28 June 1987.) There is a history to be written of the changes in the public, political and professional role of intellectuals in contemporary society. Said could write such a history, and he himself would be an important part of it. But it would have to deploy a more subtle narrative line than the destruction of vocation by profession.
This ambivalence about professional, academic scholarship extends even to work that is absolutely identified with Said’s own project. A field of studies in ‘colonial discourse’ and ‘post-colonial theory’ has now emerged as an academic specialty in large part because of Said’s brilliant pioneering scholarship. Said faithfully and generously acknowledges his numerous predecessors and even more numerous followers in this massive scholarly effort. And yet he cannot repress his nostalgia for a ‘serener time’ associated with the ‘intuitive synthesis’ of great philologists like Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer and Dilthey, or his longing for the heroic age of public intellectuals like Fanon. When Said contrasts two generations of de-colonising criticism – the ‘modernist’ figures of C.L.R. James (The Black Jacobins) and George Antinous (The Arab Awakening) on the one hand, and ‘Post-Modern’ figures like Ranajit Guha (A Rule of Property for Bengal) and S.H. Atalas (The Myth of the Lazy Native) on the other – it is clear that his heart is with the earlier men, but his head is filled with the specialised learning offered by the later scholarship. He shares the public ambitions of the great modernists, but his anti-narrative methodology and professional situation identify him with the Post-Modern moment. That is why Said’s writing seems to vacillate between the professional tones of the immensely learned scholar, working collaboratively to sift the innumerable details of specific colonial episodes, and the voice of the prophet crying in the wilderness, alienated even from the community he has helped to create.
The best summary of Said’s multiple positions is in the marvellous passage from Hugh of St Victor that concludes Culture and Imperialism: ‘The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place.’ Said is all these men: tender beginner, vulnerable to the infinite strangeness and incompleteness of his own vocation; already strong in a cosmopolitan, internationalist purview that seems at home everywhere; aspiring to a critical perfection that is sometimes indistinguishable from the most profound alienation.
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Part marriage plot, part novel about novels, “Northanger Abbey” is Austen’s strangest—and perhaps most underappreciated—work.
May 31, 2025
“Northanger Abbey” is the least beloved of Jane Austen’s six novels. It also appears frequently in university-level literature classes. These two things are related.
Completed largely in 1798 and 1799, when Austen was in her early twenties, “Northanger” was the first of Austen’s novels to be written but among the last to be published. Austen sold the manuscript in 1803, but the publisher never brought out copies of the book. Ultimately, “Northanger” didn’t appear until 1817, a few months after Austen’s death. Her brother published it along with “Persuasion,” her final novel. This history may suggest something about how unusual and uncategorizable “Northanger” is.
For one thing, it is very much a novel about novels, deriving much of its energy and humor from mocking the tropes of the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century—particularly the convention of endowing protagonists with extraordinary personal qualities and heartrending histories. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine,” the book begins. Catherine was, we learn, a plain-looking child—“awkward figure, a sallow skin . . . dark lank hair”—and was neither an orphan nor mistreated by her parents. She was more mischievous than precocious in virtue or genius, for she “never could learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid.” Austen allows that she improved—some—with age, such that, at the time the action of the book takes place, Catherine’s “heart was affectionate”; “her disposition cheerful and open, without conceit or affectation”; and her mind no more “ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.” In other words, Catherine is a nice, ordinary middle-class English girl. Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that her adventures will be of a more realistic sort than those of earlier and more conventional heroines: many of Catherine’s difficulties are brought on by her own errors in judgment rather than by the villainous machinations of her enemies. “Northanger” is, like all of Austen’s novels, a domestic drama, not a whirlwind romance or a horror story of the sort that Catherine can’t get enough of.
Catherine’s love for books is one of her most striking qualities. The ones she prefers are “all story and no reflection,” from which “nothing like useful knowledge could be gained.” Austen wrote “Northanger” in reaction to the hugely popular and highly sensational gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and her imitators, books that dominated the circulating libraries of England in the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries. However, Austen’s broader critique of novelistic convention also applies to the much less potboilerish novels of such authors as Frances Burney and Samuel Richardson. Austen admired these writers, but she could likely see that the psychological sophistication of their depictions of human nature was tethered to overheated ideas about what makes a fit hero or heroine, as well as to melodramatic plotlines involving kidnapping schemes, sudden inheritances, unfeeling parents, and mustachioed libertines—the kinds of devices Austen herself would famously eschew.
“Northanger” consists of two plotlines. One is a bildungsroman/marriage plot (that is to say, the bildungsroman culminates, as it typically does for young women in nineteenth-century novels, with marriage, making the novel fall at once into both categories) about a naïve young woman from the country who ventures out into the wider world—in this case, the fashionable resort town of Bath—where she navigates new friendships and romantic entanglements. The other is what we may call, for lack of any other name, a reading plot, in which Catherine, under the influence of her cherished gothic novels, begins to suspect the people around her of being as capable of evil as the villains she has read about.
The reading plot comes to the fore only after Catherine has had sufficient time in Bath to have been invited to visit the familial home of the siblings Eleanor and Henry Tilney, friends she has made there. At the Tilneys’ house, the titular Northanger Abbey, Catherine’s imagination becomes inflamed by the house’s age and size, and by the fact that it was once a functioning abbey, with cloisters; all this puts her in mind of Radcliffe’s historical novels, particularly “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” of which Catherine is especially enamored. She begins to feel herself to be the heroine of such a book, and almost expects to find hidden passageways that lead to secret dungeons containing bloody daggers and crumbling manuscripts that detail the horrors which have taken place there. In this mind-set, Catherine continually misinterprets what she sees, imputing dark deeds to the house’s owner, her friends’ father, General Tilney, based on scant, almost nonexistent evidence.
In fact, General Tilney is, as the reader realizes long before Catherine does, conceited, vain, money-loving, overly concerned with good eating, and a bit tyrannical. But, as unattractive as he is as a character, he is not the gothic villain—capable of murdering or imprisoning women—that Catherine briefly suspects him to be. Catherine’s readiness to see him so negatively surely reflects both her dawning suspicion that he isn’t quite the nice man he pretends to be, when he is trying to court her favor, and the pernicious effects of gothic novels on her youthful imagination.
And yet, despite its somewhat broad satire of the effect of novel-reading on a mind like Catherine’s, “Northanger” is no churlish attack on the novel. It’s not even an attack on the gothic novel. It is, rather, a rebuttal to such critiques, albeit one so elegant, and so conversant in the various arguments against the novel and its readers, that its radicalness has often passed unnoticed.
As Austen well knew, there was a gendered component to the social perception of novels. Echoing the conventional wisdom of her day, even the novel-loving Catherine wonders whether reading novels is an essentially feminine, and therefore frivolous, pursuit. “But you never read novels, I dare say?” she says to Henry Tilney, her intelligent love interest. “Why not?” he asks. She replies, “Because they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books.” To her surprise, however, Henry, channelling Austen, tells her, “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” He even confesses to taking escapist pleasure in Radcliffe’s fiction: “ ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again.”
But Austen doesn’t leave the defense of the novel to a male character. In her capacity as narrator, Austen not only unleashes some of the most passionate, if sarcastically heightened, exegeses in praise of the novel ever to be tucked delicately into the pages of one but also takes aim at the kind of casual sexism that undergirds condescension toward the form. Her irritation with those who blithely assume that nonfiction is superior, because it deals in facts and hard subjects such as politics and history, is evident when she writes:
. . . while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.”—Such is the common cant.—“And what are you reading, Miss ——” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.—“It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
Austen, though perfectly aware that many silly novels are written—and that many silly tropes appear even in good novels—is far from deriding novels in themselves as silly.
The parts of “Northanger” that are concerned with Catherine’s novel-inspired misapprehensions are there to serve Austen’s larger argumentative purposes, and thus are not entirely natural to the characters themselves. Luckily, however, these portions of the book are relatively short. And the rest of the novel—the part that is pure bildungsroman—is a delight.
Catherine Morland is second only to Elizabeth Bennet in being Austen’s most easily appealing heroine. While she lacks Elizabeth’s wit and confidence, her sweetness and ingenuity make her far easier to like than the snobbish, self-satisfied Emma or “Mansfield Park” ’s mousy and prudish Fanny Price, both of whom tend to challenge readers’ preconceptions and force us to care for, and even admire, them in spite of our biases. But Catherine wins us over the same way she wins over Henry Tilney—with the simple, unself-conscious demonstration of her good nature and sincerity. We feel what Henry feels when, dancing with him at a ball, Catherine observes that Henry’s brother Frederick has asked Catherine’s friend Isabella to dance, an occurrence that confuses Catherine, for she’d previously overheard Frederick say that he had no interest in dancing. Because she herself says only what she means, it doesn’t occur to Catherine that Frederick might merely have been pretending to have no interest in dancing—it was a pose, put on to demonstrate his superiority to the others, and was easily cast aside when he saw Isabella, a fashionable beauty. Catherine ascribes Frederick’s change of heart not to Isabella’s attractiveness but to his kindness—she imagines Frederick saw Isabella sitting by herself and felt sorry for her. This amuses Henry: “How very little trouble it can give you to understand the motive of other people’s actions,” he says.
“Why? What do you mean?”
“With you, it is not, How is such a one likely to be influenced, What is the inducement most likely to act upon such a person’s feelings, age, situation, and probable habits of life considered—but, How should I be influenced, What would be my inducement in acting so and so?”
This exchange culminates in one of the funniest lines of the novel. When Catherine confesses that she doesn’t understand what Henry is getting at, he says that they are thus on very unequal terms, since he understands her perfectly. This doesn’t surprise Catherine at all. Of course he can understand her: “I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible,” she tells him.
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Many of the book’s pleasures derive from watching Catherine’s naïveté play out. It is clear to readers, but not to Catherine, that her friend Isabella is insincere and selfish. Catherine tries again and again to give Isabella the benefit of the doubt, to interpret Isabella’s acts of inconsiderateness in the most forgiving light. This is hallmark Austen—a young person struggling to interpret the world and its inhabitants. Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, as different as they are from each other and from Catherine, have similar tendencies to misread, to rely on first impressions and wishful thinking, and thereby come to mistaken conclusions about the nature of those around them. Catherine, at least, has a better grasp of her own heart—her own feelings—than either of these more confident and overtly clever heroines.
If Catherine can hold her own in comparison with other Austen heroines, then so too can “Northanger” itself, relative to Austen’s other books. It is nearly as perfect in its style, as consistent in its irony, wit, and good sense, and as casually brutal in its skewering of those characters who rather deserve to be, if not skewered, then at least laughed at. Of Mrs. Allen, the friend who brings Catherine to Bath, for example, Austen writes, “She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment, nor manner. The air of a gentlewoman, a great deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible, intelligent man like Mr. Allen.” (Mrs. Allen’s singular fixation on clothes—her own and those of others—is one of the book’s recurring sources of humor: no matter what people around her are discussing, Mrs. Allen exposes the sad poverty of her own inner life with spontaneous utterances about gowns and dressmakers and fabric types.) The conceit and self-involvement of Isabella’s brother John is also dispatched effectively, not with aphorism but with his own words. Austen allows him to hang himself. “His conversation, or rather talk, began and ended with himself and his own concerns,” she writes. He told Catherine “of horses which he had bought for a trifle and sold for incredible sums; of racing matches, in which his judgment had infallibly foretold the winner; of shooting parties, in which he had killed more birds (though without having one good shot) than all his companions together; and described to her some famous day’s sport, with the fox-hounds, in which his foresight and skill in directing the dogs had repaired the mistakes of the most experienced huntsman. . . .” Et cetera, et cetera.
With so much in the book’s favor—a style that is trademark Austen, an appealing and ingenuous heroine, an equally appealing love interest in Henry Tilney, and an abundance of sly commentary on “the Novel” that ought to appeal to the kind of people who love Austen, i.e., to novel readers—why is “Northanger” not more appreciated? Why does almost no lover of Austen cite it as his or her favorite? The reason is likely bound up with the same quality that makes the novel so irresistible to those whose job it is to teach the history of the novel to young people.
As a novel about novels, “Northanger” operates differently than Austen’s other books. When we read “Mansfield” or “Emma,” we interpret the world through the perspective of their heroines. We feel Fanny Price’s unease when she perceives her cousin Edmund’s feelings for Mary Crawford; we are made to feel Mary’s charm, to respond to her liveliness and good humor, even as we, like Fanny, see Mary’s unsuitableness to be Edmund’s wife. Our hands are as tied as Fanny’s when it comes to the question of what to do about it; whether we like Fanny or not, we are right there with her—her ride is our ride. Likewise, when we read “Emma,” we fall prey to the same misreadings as Emma. Having been made to see the world through her eyes, we, too, think Mr. Elton is in love with Harriet Smith; we, too, are shocked to find out that this is not so. In contrast, when we read “Northanger Abbey,” we don’t see the world through Catherine’s eyes; rather, we see Catherine through the narrator’s eye. That is, Austen isn’t merely talking to the reader about novels—she is also talking to the reader about Catherine, who is both character and device, designed to send up other heroines and showcase different kinds of folly.
Consider, for example, the way Austen gives us Catherine’s mood after her first ball: “in her own hearing, two gentlemen pronounced her to be a very pretty girl. Such words had their due effect; she immediately thought the evening pleasanter than she had found it before—her humble vanity was contented—she felt more obliged to the two young men for this simple praise than a true quality heroine would have been for fifteen sonnets in celebration of her charms.” As relatable as this is, and as endearing, it is not the kind of passage designed to make the reader feel Catherine’s happiness with her. Instead of perceiving the world as she does, we see what is happening from without: while we are glad for Catherine that her “humble vanity” has been gratified, we view her in this moment primarily as a foil, a contrast to the impossibly beautiful heroines of books past.
Or watch how Austen introduces a characteristically overwrought exchange between Catherine and Isabella, the sarcasm with which Austen tells us in advance what we are to make of it: “The following conversation, which took place between the two friends in the pump-room one morning, after an acquaintance of eight or nine days, is given as a specimen of their very warm attachment, and of the delicacy, discretion, originality of thought, and literary taste which marked the reasonableness of that attachment.” As satire on the silliness of a certain kind of fast friendship between young women, this may be justified, but such a description is not designed to make us feel for Isabella the affection Catherine does, to be taken in along with her. On the contrary—we are aligned with the narrator, in on the joke.
“Northanger” ’s pleasures come not from the novel’s traditional method of inhabiting the mind of a character but from something more removed. Instead of causing us to become Catherine, Austen engages us in a conversation about Catherine. Since Austen’s observations are dry and ironic and sensible and compelling, this makes for very pleasant conversation, but it still leads to a more cerebral reading experience than we are accustomed to when we read fiction, particularly Austen’s fiction. Thus, the very quality that makes “Northanger” catnip for academics—its eloquence on the topic of “the Novel”—also makes it less of a novel qua novel than Austen’s other books.
But that doesn’t mean “Northanger” doesn’t deserve to be more appreciated. It does. For one, Austen’s full-throated defense of “the Novel” is not only charming but rousing, especially since Austen, unlike a contemporary writer, was unlikely in her era to be cheered for calling out casual sexism and unconscious bias. Moreover, even without allowing us to fully inhabit Catherine’s point of view, “Northanger” is a joy to read. Lighter in tone than Austen’s later novels, it is at once youthful in spirit and sophisticated in technique. That is to say, whatever its built-in limitations, it doesn’t read like an apprentice novel.
The book’s circuitous path to publication is at least part of the reason for this. Because “Northanger” wasn’t published until just after Austen’s death—almost two decades after she finished it—she was able to go back to the manuscript, to polish and refine it. As a result, “Northanger” is that rarest of rarities: an exuberant first novel that, sentence by sentence, and in moral tone, is simultaneously the work of an artist in full command of her powers. ♦
This is drawn from the introduction to a new edition of “Northanger Abbey.”
Note: The articles from the blog "Jane Austen - Her Life And Works" were written by ivantrad (@) outlook (dot) com (accessible only via Wayback Machine)