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Jane Austen Editing Collaborative

The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen

The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen

1: Chronology of Jane Austen's life (Deirdre Le Faye) - This is literally a timeline of Austen's life. It might make a good reference for a "Jane Austen Timeline" page.
2: The professional woman writer (Jan Fergus) - This chapter has a lot of detail on the publication of individual novels. It is too specific for this page, in general, but would be helpful for the novel articles.

• "The image that Henry Austen creates - at odds with the evidence that both Austen's letters and her publishing decisions offer of her professionalism - is precisely the one that so annoyed Henry James, according to Brian Southam: 'the myth of the inspired amateur, the homely spinster who put down her knitting needles to take up her pen'. That myth, and others like it, have prevented subsequent readers from understanding that, for Austen, being professional writer was, apart from her family, more important to her than anything else in her life." (13)
  

3: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice (Rachel M. Brownstein) - This chapter offers a reading of each individual novel. It would be most useful on the novel pages, I think.

• "playful and purposeful irony seems to me the most important thing about Jane Austen" (34)
  
• "Jane Austen, in her twenties, is easily imagined as asking herself what we write novels for, and answering that she for one wrote to criticize and perfect the form. Her early novels are all brilliantly aware of themselves as novels - heroine-centred domestic fictions of a kind that became popular in the wake of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1742) and Clarissa (1747-8)." (35)
  

4: Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion (John Wiltshire) - This chapter offers a reading of each individual novel. It would be most useful on the novel pages, I think.

• MP, E and P "develop that complicating of a romantic narrative with social satire and psychological insights characteristic of her earlier work. These novels also display a more intensified sense of the influence of place and environment on personality and action, a broader and more thoughtful social critique, and a much greater power of imagining her figures within the social and geographical spaces they inhabit." (58)
  

5: The short fiction (Margaret Anne Doody) - Jane Austen as a "Regency" writer.

• "Austen's early fiction is a mock-pastoral world in which eviscerated institutions, or institutionalized ideas, though sometimes honoured in gesture, are unable to contain the characters' curiosity, animation, or general desire for self-gratification. The desire for self-gratification prevails everywhere - including in the heroine modelled on Jane's best friend and devoted sister." (92)
  
• "For if the shorter works are not treated as childish effusions, they begin to loom very large indeed in Austen's oeuvre, pointing to the alternative Austen who might have been a different writer, who might have figured in our calendar more like Diderot or Borges. It is not enough to say she is a parodist - though that is much - or to say that she is a satirist - which is a great deal more. We have to acknowledge, I think, that she here creates in her short fiction a 'world of her own', as we say - or that such a world becomes adumbrated." (92)
  
• "In her early fiction, Jane Austen could write with zest and confidence. She had inherited a taste for irony, paradox, and 'sparkle' from the eighteenth century. Her early writing is rough, violent, sexy, joky. It sparkles with knowingness. It attacks whole structures, including cultural structures that had made regularized and constricted place for the Novel, as well as the very workings (in stylized plot and character) of the English novel itself." (98)
  

6: The letters (Carol Houlihan Flynn) - This is a reading of Austen's letters based on her novels and ideas about "the novel". This is not particularly helpful for us, I think.
7: Class (Juliet McMaster) - This article outlines the class delineations in Austen's novels using examples from the novels.

• "A title, it seems, is sometimes almost a guarantee of fatuousness in Austen's fiction." (116)
  
• "The long-established but untitled landowning family does seem to gather Austen's deep respect, especially if its income comes from land and a rent-roll" (117) Ex: Darcy and Knightley
  
• "Austen is often happy to follow the Cinderella plot, and to make a happy ending out of marrying her heroine to a man notably above her in income and social prestige." (117)
  
• Austen is keenly aware of the problems caused by primogeniture and other legal bindings to money and land. EX: entail in PP
  
• "Austen's best sympathies rest with the professional class" (120); EX: Catherine, Elinor, Fanny marry clergymen
  
• "The navy . . . is the profession Austen favours next after the clergy." (121) EX: Persuasion; This is over and above the army, which is not represented very positively (121-22). EX: Wickham, Captain Tilney
  
• "The quality of humanity is to be judged by moral and humane standards, Austen suggests, not by social status; but like her own temporary snobs, Darcy and Emma, she pays full attention to their social status first." (125; see also 129) EX: Gardiners
  

8: Money (Edward Copeland) - This chapter details the minute attention Austen pays to matter of money and economics.

• "From the focus of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, where the single most significant economic problem for women is the lack of a fortune, Austen's works steadily engage women in more and more complex relationships to the economy. Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, each in turn, move through an examination of the economy as measure of social morality, as agent of social disruption, as source of national identity, and, in the final fragment Sandition, as 'Activity run mad!'" (132; see also 138-39)
  
• "Austen approaches the subject, money, from three different, but related, points of view. First, as a member of the pseudo-gentry, that is to say, the upper professional ranks of her rural society; second, as a woman in that society, severely handicapped by law and custom from possessing significant power over money; finally, as a novelist who joins other women novelists in a larger conversation about money." (133)
  

9: Religion and politics (Gary Kelly) - This chapter describes the historical and literary background relevant to Austen's novels. It is quite thorough; I have not included all of its major points. If we need more, we can always go back.

• Austen was writing in the wake of Jacobin/Anti-Jacobin novels (e.g. Caleb Williams) as well as the developing historical and realist traditions (e.g. Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth) (152).
  
• Austen was a devout Anglican (152).
  
• "It would seem likely, then, that a woman like Austen would support the historical hierarchical social structure and constitution of church and state, yet could recognize that they should be open to merit - including female merit in the domestic sphere - if they were to avoid the closedness and rigidity that many blamed for causing the social and political upheavals of the Revolution and its aftermath." (153)
  
• In 1939 Canon Harold Anson argued that Austen's novels are religious not because they contain religious controversy or 'a strong ecclesiastical motif' . . . but because they show 'the underlying principles upon which men live their lives and by which they judge the characters of others'. This has become the dominant view of those critics who find Austen to be a religious novelist. Some critics have even argued that her portrayal of clergymen was intended to promote greater spirituality and social responsibility in the church." (155)
  
• It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Austen's novels were viewed as political. "Some critics argue that to mock politics is to disparage the importance of the 'masculine' public and political sphere in relation to the 'feminine' domestic and local sphere. Others argue that ignoring politics casts doubt on the knowability or reality of the public and political sphere in contrast to the domestic sphere." (155)
  

• Political themes: the French Revolution, imperialism, capitalism, Regency politics, sensibility (156)
  
• There is no agreement on Austen's political views. "Some see her as a political 'conservative' because she seems to defend the established social order. Others see her as sympathetic to 'radical' politics that challenged the established order, especially in the form of patriarchy . . . some critics see Austen's novels as neither conservative nor subversive, but complex, criticizing aspects of the social order but supporting stability and an open class hierarchy." (156)
  

• Austen's political commentary might also be seen in the form of her novels ("could" is Kelly's word) (159).
  

• EX: Austen does not use the forms associated with the Jacobin novel; for example, she does not use first-person narration, but rather the "authoritative" third person favored by Anti-Jacobin writers (160).
  
• EX: Austen's plots can be seen as Anglican; "Austen's plots are resolved by neither the protagonist's rational will nor the force of systemic injustice, by neither a deus ex machina nor coincidence, but by a convergence of will and circumstance, or something like grace." (163)
  

• Kelly says her genre is the "Anglican romance" (167).
  

10: Style (John F. Burrows) - The article is about Austen's ability to effectively create voices for her characters.

• Austen improves on the rough dialectical differences of authors like Edgeworth and Burney (173).
  
• Austen's characters debate important topics, but those debates always begin with something small, like screens (174).
  
• Austen's novels have very little narrative or scenic descriptions compared to others of the time; she has much more dialogue (178).
  
• Austen's novels embody Bakhtin's dialogism (180).
  
• Austen's authorial voice "disrupts" her novels; it is not a part of an enclosed world - it connects the reader to the "real" world (181).
  

11: Jane Austen and literary traditions (Isobel Grundy) - This chapter discusses Austen's reading habits and how they influenced her novels.

• "She picked her reading matter for herself from a wide range of rich and multiple traditions; but she knew no tradition systematically or comprehensively. One result of this situation is that she never assumes the role role of disciple or student, let alone that of pedagogue. She recognizes no canonical status, acknowledges no literary authority. She assumes the sufficiency of her own taste as guide to literary value" (190)
  
• Austen rarely overtly discusses politics in her novels: "Whether to read this as female outsidership or as traditional Augustan irony is a matter of taste." (194)
  
• Austen was very familiar with and highly influenced by the language of the King James Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (195).
  

• "The almost prehistorical authors of the Old Testament have bequeathed her their rapidity and spareness of narrative, the New Testament writers their remarkable ability to enter the common mind and to conjure an illusion of verisimilitude by means of a single detail" (196)
  
• "her taste for brief declarative sentences is something she shares with the gospels" (196)
  

• "Those critics are surely right who see Austen's natural place in the course of English literature as being among the Augustans. She knows the established canon: Addison, Pope, Gay, the Swift of Gulliver's Travels, Thomson, Gray, Goldsmith, and Charlotte Lennox" (197)
  

• "Austen's best-loved authors are those with Augustan affinities: apart from Crabbe, they are Richardson, Johnson, Cowper, and Burney" (197).
  
• "Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, 1753-4, and Burney's Camilla probably share the palm for frequency of mention in Austen's surviving letters, though Evelina, or, A Young Lady's Entrance Into the World, 1778, runs them close." (198)
  
• Austen "developed her mastery of balance from Pope, wisdom and playfulness from Johnson, gendered power-struggle and immediacy of representation from Richardson, relation of books to life from Lennox, pathos and domesticity from Cowper, grotesque from Burney" (203)
  
• Johnson:
  

• "Her letters resemble his in their minute detail and in their guessing games of half-submerged, shorthand reference" (199)
   :::*"Austen relished Johnson's habits of playful intertextuality and hidden meanings." (199)
  
• "Critics have noticed that Fanny Price and Anne Elliot are both reliant on Johnson for their moral thinking." (200)
  

• Johnson vs. Cowper:
  

• "Austen makes Cowper stand generically for rural, domestic life and Johnson for urban, social life" (199)
  
• "Another kind of opposition between Johnson and Cowper implicitly underlies Sense and Sensibility: between Elinor's Johnsonian attempts to combat grief and depression through mental activity, and Marianne's Cowperesque savouring of melancholy. Fanny Price unites Johnson and Cowper, sense and sensibility." (199)
  
• "While so many of her characters thus admire Cowper, their narrator is consistently Johnsonian." (199)
  

12: Austen cults and cultures (Claudia L. Johnson) - This chapter describes the fluctuations in Austen reception, with an emphasis on the relationship between academic and "Janeite" readers.

• After 1832, Austen's novels were republished by Richard Bentley in the Standard Novels series, but they were not bestsellers (211).
  
• Modern "Janeitism" did not begin until after the publication of J. E. Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870 (211).
  
• Janeitism: "the self-consciously idolatrous enthusiasm for 'Jane' and every detail relative to her" (211)
  
• In the early 20th century, Janeitism was "principally a male enthusiasm shared among publishers, professors, and literati" (213)
  
• The chapter has an extensive reading of Kipling's "Janeites".
  
• "Chapman's was the first scholarly edition of any English novelist - male or female - every to appear." (218)
  
• F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948) "dignifies Austen as well as the great tradition of English fiction she originated by insisting on her moral seriousness, and accordingly, the leisured amateurism of Janeites - with their fondness for entertainment, performance, and comedy - is noxious to him." (219)
  
• Academic critics are interested in "judging character development, formal control, and resistance or compliance with norms as mediated through marriage, as an institution and plot device." (222)
  
• "the ludic enthusiasm of these amateur reading clubs, whose 'performances' include teas, costume balls, games, readings, and dramatic representations, staged with a campy anglophilia in North America, and a brisker antiquarian meticulousness in England, and whose interests range from Austenian dramatizations, to fabrics, to genealogies, and to weekend study trips" (223)
  
• "The process by which academic critics deprecate Austenian admirers outside the academy is very similar to the way . .. trekkies, fans, and mass media enthusiasts are derided and marginalizied by dominant cultural institutions bent on legitimizing their own objects and protocols of expertise." (224)
  

13: Further reading (Bruce Stovel) - A helpful bibliography of Austen scholarship.

Jane Austen in Context

Jane Austen in Context (Todd, editor)

Note: This edited collection is the ninth and last volume in the new Cambridge University Press edition of the works of Jane Austen. The book's 40 chapters are divided into three parts: "Life and Works," "Critical Fortunes," and "Historical and Cultural Context." In addition, there is a chronology prepared by Deirdre Le Fay and and an extensive and helpful bibliography of works for further reading, with separate lists for each of the chapters. There is some overlap with the Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen but this book seems to be the more useful of the two.

Chronology (Deirdre Le Fay)

Part I: Life and works

Chapter 1: Biography (Jan Fergus)

• Biographical information concerning Jane Austen is "famously scarce." Only some family letters by and about Austen remain from the period before she died, and her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were originally addressed) is known to have censored the collection of Jane's letters she retained, excising material from some and destroying others. Admiral Francis Austen retained a collection of Jane's letters until he died, but his heirs destroyed them. Much of the biographical material produced for fifty years after Jane Austen's death was written by her relatives and reflects the family's biases in favor of "good quiet Aunt Jane." (pp. 3-4)

• Fergus focuses to an unusual degree on economics and finances. He/she includes a brief discussion of the Austen family finances and Jane's own financial situation. Austen attempted to follow the path to professional authorship pioneered by Aphra Benn, Frances, Burney, Maria Edgeworth et al in large measure to earn an independent income. Because authorship was not then respectable for women, Austen's need to earn money conflicted with her need to maintain her social reputation - she published anonymously as a result. (pp. 4-5) Fergus then presents a short description of Jane Austen's family background, notably comparing its economic circumstances to those of various characters in Austen's novels (pp. 5-6), some basic biographical information (pp. 7-8), and the economics of her publishing career (pp. 8-11).

Chapter 2: Chronology of composition and publication (Kathryn Sutherland)

• Sutherland identifies three separate chronologies that must be considered, that of composition, of revision and of publication. These are not easily disentangled, given a dearth of reliable information and Austen's history of rewriting and revising her first three novels – NA, S & S, and P & P. There is a fourth chronology that bears on the first three, that of the unpublished works – e.g., The Watsons, Sanditon, the Juvenilia. Sutherland reviews the early (and now superseded) ideas about these JA chronologies. She notes the likelihood that the composition of first drafts of Austen's first three novels overlapped the composition of the later works among the Juvenilia in the period 1795-1797. She discusses Lady Susan and The Watsons as transitional works. (pp. 12-15)

• Ideas of chronology are based most firmly on a memorandum, written by Cassandra Austen (and quoted in full), on the dates of composition of the six novels. Sutherland then discusses the history of composition and publication of the six novels (pp. 15-20) and includes a table with abstracts of the relevant information. (pp. 20-22)

Chapter 3: Language (Anthony Mandal)

• Mandal notes that "the rich and dynamic language that is natural to Austen" is evidenced as early as the Juvenilia, in which the subject matter–"illegitimacy, alcoholism, gambling, theft, violence and murder– is reflected in the raw, unmediated language" Austen uses. (p. 23)

• Austen was preoccupied with the potential for language to be misused. Misuse of conventional language generates much of Austen's ironic humor, along with the use of foreign terms ("caro sposo" by Mrs. Elton) and fashionable words, all of which tend to indicate moral inadequacy or confusion on the part of the speaker. (pp. 24-27)

• Austen uses such words as "manners," "amiable," "duty" and prudence" consistently throughout her fiction as signifiers of her ethical system. The term "manners" has two aspects, "appropriate adherence to codes of social conduct" and "conduct in its moral aspect." (p. 27)

• Her attention to the natural rhythms of speech accounts for the dramatic quality of Austen's writing. Austen tends to minimize physical description but to use dialogue to reveal the moral nature of her characters. "Austen's sustained use of dialogue, with its increasing naturalism, combines with her specific on-stage placement of characters, in order to provide a dramatic urgency to novels in which not very much actually happens." (pp. 28-29)

• Austen uses ironic disjunction–the contrast between the plain meaning of a statement and the comic disturbance of its authority by something which happens later. An example is the famous opening lines of P & P ("It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .") The statement is clear but the course of the novel (and of Austen's other fiction) disproves it. It is not single men of good fortune who need wives, but dependent women without fortunes who need husbands. (pp. 29-30)

• Austen's use of free indirect speech–the blending of the speech or thoughts of her characters with the narrator's descriptions–is her most important stylistic achievement. Free indirect speech is used to provide summaries of conversations or to compress a character's thoughts or speech for purposes of drama or irony. (pp. 30-31)

• Austen's fiction links linguistic deterioration with moral and ethical decay. Specifically, this linguistic and moral decline is tied to the role that money plays in the "marriage market." "[Austen's] fiction is paradoxically saturated with the discourse of economics, to the point that her plots are driven by financial imperatives. Despite this, Austen does attempt to locate a solution by constructing an alternative discourse of "manners...." as discussed above. (pp. 31-32)

Chapter 4: Letters (Dierdre Le Fay)

• Le Fay estimates that Jane Austen wrote about 3,000 letters during her lifetime, of which about 160 are known and published. (p. 33)

• Austen's niece Caroline wrote that Cassandra had burned the largest part of the letters she retained shortly before her death in 1845. Some of the remaining letters had portions excised. Le Fay guesses that this censorship was to hide comments by JA about neighbors and relatives who were still alive at the time Cassandra died. (pp. 33-34)

• The early biographical works by family members were based on very limited collections of letters to which the authors had access at the time. (p. 34)

• In 1932, Chapman attempted to explain the largely "domestic" content of the letters–most of the letters were addressed to Cassandra, so that news and family information would have taken precedence over more weighty topics, which could wait until the sisters were together again, especially considering that postage was very expensive and provided a strong incentive for short letters. (p. 37)

Chapter 5: Literary influences (Jane Stabler)

• Stabler begins by discussing the books and plays to which Austen had access during her lifetime, beginning with her father's 500 volume library at Steventon. Henry Austen described his father's taste as wide-ranging, encompassing "every species of literature." (from the Biographical Notice) The Austen family staged contemporary plays by Bickerstaffe, Centlivre, Fielding, Sheridan and Garrick while Jane Austen was young and regularly read aloud in the evening novels by Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Swift and (of course) Jane Austen and her niece Anna. Later in life, Austen had access to her brother Edward's library at Godmersham Park and was a member of an active book club in Chawton. (pp. 41-42)

• Austen was familiar with the classical and contemporary English poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, James Thompson, Thomas Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper and Crabbe, as well as Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell, Wordsworth and Burns. She also read the novels of her contemporaries such as Scott, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. Stabler identifies Burney and Edgeworth as Austen's most immediate literary influences. (pp. 42-43)

• "Themes of educational and moral development permeated eighteenth-century fictional and non-fictional prose." (p. 43) Stabler mentions Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novels, periodical literature and conduct guides such as Thomas Gisborne's An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. (pp. 43-44)

• Samuel Johnson was an important influence on Austen. Another was Samuel Richardson's The Histroy of Sir Charles Grandison, which was a favorite of the entire Austen family and which Jane Austen knew in detail. "Richardson's influence does not stamp Austen's writing in any single way; rather, his novels provided characters, situations, narrative tensions and a consuming fascination with inner life which Austen developed in different contexts." (pp. 44-45)

• "In the letters to Cassandra in particular, we can hear the ways in which shared reading nourishes allusive asides between the sisters in the form of private jokes about, for example, the inexperience of provincials in the big city." However, Austen ridiculed the "more consciously learned allusions [which] were an obligatory feature of polite literature." (p. 46)

• Cowper was Austen's favorite moral poet. "Marianne Dashwood and Fanny Price express their inner convictions and integrity through Cowper's poetry, but there is more than a hint of naive fancy in each. Only Mr. Knightley invokes Cowper's poetry with anything like the subtlety of its author." (p. 48)

• Stabler notes how Austen's male characters use a newspaper to shield themselves from social interaction: Edmund and Mr. Price read newspapers and neglect Fanny Price; Charles Hayter reads and fails to remove a child from Anne Elliott's back in Persuasion; "[t]aciturn newspaper reading defines Mr. Palmer's existence [in Sense and Sensibility]. (p. 49)

• Stabler cautions that we do not know everything that Austen read or her reactions to particular works we know she did read. Accordingly, it is impossible to completely account for Austen's literary influences. (p. 49)

Chapter 6: Memoirs and biographies (Dierdre Le Fay)

• Le Fay provides a historical survey of the Austen biographical tradition, beginning with Henry Austen's Biographical Notice appended to the first edition of Northanger Abbey/Persuasion published in 1817 and continuing through a variety of recent biographies (Honan, Tomalin, Shields, Noakes) and monographs. She notes the preponderant influence of writings by family members at least until 1885 and the publication of the article on Austen by Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary of National Biography. Family publications continued to be important through 1920. (pp. 51-58)

Chapter 7: Poetry (David Selwin)

• Selwyn begins by reviewing the poetry of Cassandra Austen (Jane's mother) and James Austen. Theophilus Leigh described Mrs. Austen at age six as "already the poet of the family" and his characterization turned out to be correct. Mrs. Austen's surviving poetry reveals "a delightful wit and considerable metrical skill." James Austen, Jane's older brother, wrote poetry throughout his life, evidencing "a lively humor" and "a lyricism derived from Thomson and Cowper." (pp. 59-63)

• Jane Austen wrote mainly short, light, often humorous poems concerned with domestic matters. Her poems seldom touch even peripherally on current events. In her poetry, Austen sometimes spoke in the voice of an imagined character. Her 1808 poem commemorating the 1804 death of her friend Mrs. Lefroy in a riding accident represents her only attempt to deal poetically with serious matters. Her last written work, three days before her death, was a humorous poem depicting the reaction of St. Swithun to a racing meet to be held around the time of his Saint's Day. (pp. 63-67)

Chapter 8: Portraits (Margaret Kirkham)

• There is no good, undisputed portrait of Jane Austen. (p. 68)

• Cassandra Austen did a watercolor sketch showing Jane Austen from behind, wearing a bonnet. The sketch is dated 1804 and bears the initials "C.E.A." The identity of the subject was confirmed by later letters of Henry Austen and Austen's niece, Anna. There exists in addition an unsigned, undated pencil and watercolor sketch of a woman wearing a cap and seated in a ladderback chair. This is believed by Kirkham to be a sketch of Jane Austen by Cassandra, but the supporting evidence is entirely circumstantial, resting on the provenance of this sketch - both sketches were given by Cassandra to a niece and accepted as authentic by several of the Austen nieces and nephews who were old enough to have known Jane Austen personally. (pp. 68-72)

• The Rice portrait (formerly known as the Zoffany portrait) of an adolescent girl is almost certainly not of Jane Austen, although that conclusion has become more controversial in recent years as proponents of the identification of the sitter as JA have become more insistent. Issues: (i) provenance—there is no known written reference to the portrait dating to earlier than 1880; (ii) the portrait did not surface until after virtually everyone who knew JA personally was dead, and the family traditions about this portrait all date from after 1880; (iii) there is no biographical evidence that JA ever sat for a professional portrait, in her surviving letters or in the biographical writings or letters of anyone who knew her; and (iv) evidence as to the date of the portrait is disputed, but the consensus among experts is that dress and style rule out a date of production earlier than 1800, when JA was 25. (pp. 72-74)

• Two silhouettes exist which are claimed to be of Jane Austen, one found pasted into a volume of Mansfield Park with a hand-written inscription "L'amimable Jane" and the second donated to Winchester Cathedral by two of Austen's grandnieces. The first has been attributed to a professional profilist who worked in Bath while JA lived there and is tentatively dated 1801. There exists no independent evidence that would permit a positive identification of the sitter. Dierdre Le Fay believes, based on physical evidence, that the second is of a descendant of JA and dates to 1895. (p. 75)

• Two drawings were catalogued as portraits of JA when the contents of Godmersham House were auctioned in 1983. They are now privately owned, have not been seen since the sale and have not been studied. No basis is known for the identification given in the catalogue. In addition, a full-length watercolor portrait (the "Stanier Clarke portrait") is pasted into a "friendship book" kept by James Stanier Clark, but there is no known evidence that would permit an identification of the person pictured. (p. 75)

• At the time he published his Memoir in 1870, J. E. Austen-Leigh commissioned James Andrews to engrave a new portrait of JA based on the "ladderback" watercolor, which was judged to be unsatisfactory. "It was meant to make Aunt Jane presentable to the Victorian public." If the original watercolor is a fair representation of Jane Austen, the engraving "imporves" her image by softening it and moderating the attitude apparent in the face of the sitter. (p. 76)

Part II: Critical Fortunes

Chapter 9: Critical responses, early (Mary Waldron)

Chapter 10: Critical responses, 1830-1970 (Nicola Trott)

Chapter 11: Critical responses, recent (Rajeswari Rajan)

I chose not to summarize these chapters because they are off-topic, at least for now. Waldron focuses her article on the contemporary reception of the novels and the immediate posthumous reviews, finishing with Richard Whately's 1821 review in The Quarterly Review. She also briefly discusses the context–"a gradual and distinct change in attitude to the novel genre and to novelists...." (p. 83) Her article is clearly written, informative and interesting. Trott covers a much longer time period and so must be (and is) more superficial. She discusses specific reviewers but writes more about the long-term trends in Austen criticism, including the struggle between Janeites and anti-Janeites. Rajan writes about a shorter period in more detail. She discusses in some detail Marilyn Butler, Mary Waldron, John Wiltshire, Gilbert and Gubar, Brown/Kirkham,/Johnson as a unit, Eve Sedgwick's radical feminism, Edward Said, and several other modern critics in lesser detail. Rajan's article might be a good cross-check when we have completed our reading/summarizing of the modern critics.

Chapter 12: Cult of Jane Austen (Deidre Shauna Lynch)

• Lynch identifies two strong strains in Austen criticism: consideration of the works, and consideration of the "ardent" response to them. Citing a recent example from Marjorie Garber, Lynch continues: "Jane Austen fosters in her readers, as most other literary giants do not, the devotion and fantasies of personal access that are the hallmarks of the fan. For a century, therefore, many a commentator has accompanied his interest in the novels with an interest in the extravagancy of audiences' responses to them — an interest particularly in how that heady enthusiasm diverges from the level-headed dispassion that is supposed to define a proper aesthetic response." (p. 111)

• The late Victorian period is the point at which this personal identification with Austen seems to have surfaced. The adoption around 1894 of the term "Janeite" by those who felt this way to describe themselves is emblematic of the change. The change is generally thought to derive from the publication in 1870 by J. E. Austin-Leigh of the Memoir of Jane Austen, the first attempt at a full-length biography and the first available source of information and family traditions about Austen's personal life. (p. 112)

• Lynch notes other "tensions that have shaped Austen reception history": between Austen as an exemplar and teacher of "Englishness" to the public as a whole and Austen as the focus of an exclusive club, between the popular audience for Austen's work and Austen's work as a vineyard for academic and scholarly work. (pp. 112-113)

• Lynch notes the aptness of the term "cult" in its various senses to describe the attitudes of committed "Janeites." She compares various practices of religious reverence (relics, pilgrimages) with the activities and attitudes of this group. Travels to places Jane Austen lived or places pictured in her novels (or places used as sets in movies of Jane Austen's works) permit "a kind of time-travel to the past, because they preserve an all but vanished Englishness or set of 'traditional' values....This may demonstrate the influence of a sentimental account of Austen's novels that presents them as means by which readers might go home again — to a comfortable, soothingly normal world." These activities and attitudes seem at times to render the works themselves as surplus or beside the point. (pp. 113-117)

Chapter 13: Later publishing history, with illustrations (David Gilson)

I believe this chapter to be largely off-topic, although very interesting. Gilson covers both domestic (British) and foreign publishing history, and provides many illustrations from the works discussed. It's fascinating to see in the illustrations how portrayals of particular characters and incidents evolve over time.

Chapters 14 and 15: Sequels (Deidre Shauna Lynch), Translations (Valérie Cossy and Diego Saglia)

Part III: Historical and cultural context

The remainder of the book is a series of short articles, most of which are entirely or largely off-topic. I will deal with a few that seem to me to have special relevance. If any of the others look interesting to you, let me know and I will add coverage.

Chapter 16: Agriculture (Robert Clark and Gerry Dutton)

Chapter 17: Book production (James Raven)

• Jane Austen lived through a revolution in book production. Before 1700, up to 1,800 titles were published annually, while by 1830 more than 6,000 were published each year. This is only a crude metric, because it ignores the "huge increases in the edition sizes of certain types of publication, increases that escalated during the 1820s." During this period, hundreds of new bookshops and subscription and circulating libraries opened, and printed books penetrated ever more deeply into British society. (p. 194) In 1775, thirty-one new novels were published in Britain; in 1811, eighty new titles were published; and in 1818, sixty-two titles were published. (pp. 195-196)

• Throughout most of Austen's life, legal (copyright), organizational and technological constraints combined to limit book production. "The British book production regime was characterized by the extreme variability of the size and price of the printed text, [and] by multiple but modestly sized reprintings of successful titles (instead of ambitious single print runs....Above all, the price of new and reprinted books had been modulated for most of the eighteenth century by the effective cartelization of the trade in which booksellers' protection of reprinting rights [through ownership of claimed perpetual copyrights] maintained monopoly prices in England (although not in Ireland and only ineffectively in Scotland, whose booksellerss led the challenge against English claims to perpetual copyright." Only toward the end of Austen's writing career did steam-driven presses and paper-making machinery make mass production of books possible. It was, however, no overnight revolution and Austen would derive no direct benefits from it." (pp. 194-195)

• Novel publishers used new advertising techniques to increase sales, the costs of which could be shocking to authors. In 1816, John Murray charged Austen £50 for advertising Emma for the first nine months after its publication; part of this was for "advertising" in Murray's own book catalogue. (p. 196)

• Publishers perceived that the market for individual novels was limited. Most novels were published in editions of not more than 500 copies. Even some of the most successful titles were issued in editions of 750-800 copies. Sixty percent of novels published (in such small editions) between 1770 and 1800 were not reprinted. These figures contrast with editions of other types of books - 2,000 copy editions of typical playbooks, popular histories in editions of 4,000, an 18,000 copy edition of a popular spelling manual. (pp. 196-197)

• The average price of a three volume novel increased from about 12s between 1802 and 1805 to about 18s between about 1813 and 1817. The increase reflected an increase in labor costs of about one-third between 1785 and 1810, and a doubling of the price of quality paper from 1793 and 1801. [Presumably this reflected wartime economic conditions and the ability of monopoly producers to pass increases in production costs directly along to consumers. (PCM)] (p. 197) Circulating libraries were a major market for novels, and that fact kept the sales figures down since a circulating library copy would have meny readers. In 1770, one author estimated that 40% of all copies of novels were sold to circulating libraries. (pp. 200-201

• Nearly three-quarters of novels published between 1770 and 1820 were published anonymously. However, by the 1790s, one fifth of novels were published under a female author's name (some of these pseudonyms). During the 1810s, perhaps a majority of novel titles were published by women (whether identified as such or not) (p. 198)

• There were several options for publication: (i) publication by subscription, which to be practical often required the endorsement of "an illustrious dedicatee" (e.g., the Prince Regent), (ii) sale of the copyright outright, after which all financial risks of publication were borne by the publisher, (iii) publication at the author's expense, where the author put up the capital necessary to cover costs of publication and risks and rewards were entirely the author's, or (iv) publication "on commission," where the publisher advanced the costs of publication and charged only a commission on each sale but the author agreed to be liable for all losses. Publishing "on commission" was relatively uncommon in the 1810s (most unestablished authors sold copyrights outright) but Austen published three of her novels (and Henry and Cassandra published the last two) "on commission" and sold only one copyright, for Pride and Prejudice. Raven feels that Austen was not an adroit negotiator in refusing Murray's offer of £450 for the copyrights of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Emma, yet praises the "shrewdness" of her commission agreements. (pp. 198-200)

• The combined profits of the four Austen novels published during her lifetime amounted to about £700, "a decent but by no means great fortune." Raven also notes the great disparity in the financial rewards of novel writing during this period. Frances Burney earned more than £4,000 from her share in the later editions of Camilla. Maria Edgeworth earned £1,050 for her 1812 series Tales of Fashionable Life and a further £2,100 in 1814 for Patronage. On the other hand, of the fifty or so surviving publishing contracts from this period, the average payment was about £80, and the surviving contracts are largely from the archives of a few publishers known for their generosity to authors. (p. 200)

• There were about 600 publishers of novels between 1770 and 1830, but many were short-lived and financially unsuccessful. During this period, four London firms (none published Austen) published the bulk of novels and one, the Minerva Press of William Lane, published one third of all new titles in the 1790s. (p. 201)

Chapter 18-21: Cities (Jane Stabler), Consumer goods (David Selwyn), Domestic architecture (Claire Lamont), Dress (Antje Blank)

Chapter 22: Education and accomplishments (Gary Kelly)

• "Education as usually understood today—schooling in certain skills, practices and bodies of knowledge—formed only part of education as Jane Austen and her contemporaries understood it: a process of socialisation and acculturation based on moral self-discipline and designed to fit the individual for a range of related roles in life, according to sex and rank. Furthermore, during the prolonged national and imperial crisis of Austen's day education became a field of ideological struggle in which the social groups who read Austen's novels—the upper middle class and the gentry—were deeply implicated. Austen's novels are 'about education' because they demonstrate the importance of female education to these social groups and particularly to their material interests in an age of revolutionary change." (p. 252)

• Kelly provides a summary list of the English writers who concerned themselves with the issue of female education during the period 1688-1814. These include James Fordyce (1766), of course, as well as Hester Chapone, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Jane West, Robert Bage, and Maria Wollstonecraft. The dominant concern of these works was the role of women in reproducing the dominant economic, social, political and cultural order, then being challenged by radical economic changes, the effects of war, and the emergent middle and professional classes. (pp. 252-253)

• While women were marginalized in the classes described in Austen's novels, they were believed to be essential to maintaining the position of those classes in society and to need appropriate education for doing so. Women performed three essential functions: they bore male heirs (and needed education to avoid illegitimate children), they brought capital (cash or property) into marriage (and needed education to avoid dissipating capital through improvident expenditures), and they were responsible, through their own examples and their educational efforts, for the moral behavior of others in their families (and needed education to ensure that they behaved well and set the proper example). (pp. 254-255)

• The education of women in these classes focussed on "accomplishments" such as dancing, singing and playing music, drawing, modern languages, decorative needlework, knowledge of current books and "belles-letters," and the art of polite conversation, all of which were intended to enable women to attract husbands and display taste and "polite" knowledge as markers of cultural, and therefore social, distinction. (p. 257)

• Women who lacked accomplishments were sometimes referred to as "notable," which meant that they knew no more than the common everyday tasks of the domestic economy and were not capable of a cultivated social life. Women might also be described as "learned," not a complimentary term, when they had knowledge of those areas thought proper only for men - classical and Biblical languages, mathematics, theology, and science. "Learned" women were thought to be unfit for marriage or polite society. (pp. 257-258)

• Increasingly, in Jane Austen's time, the education of women to be "accomplished" was criticized as too narrow. Kelly cites Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women as the best example of this trend. (p. 258) Kelly then goes on to compare Austen with Wollstonecraft and Hannah More on these issues. Kelly notes that Austen was much less openly didactic in her work, avoided the conventional "fallen woman" (except for Maria Bertram) and her fate, and was uninterested in women who exemplified "pictures of perfection" (her heroines, like Elizabeth Bennet, tended to be flawed) (258-259)

Chapters 23-25: Food (Maggie Lane), Landownership (Chris Jones), Landscape (Alistair M. Duckworth)

Chapter 26: :Literary [To Come]

Chapter 27: Manners (Paula Byrne

Chapter 28: Medicine, illness and disease (John Wiltshire)

Chapter 29: Money (Edward Copeland)

• Jane Austen's lifetime was a time of rapid economic change and related dislocations, compounded by the stresses of the extended war with France. Her times saw an expanding commercial sector, a rapidly developing consumer culture, high taxes, scarce capital, an inadequate system of banking and credit, and large fortunes made and lost by those who never before had money. People living on fixed incomes were, and were seen to be, in serious economic trouble. (p. 317)

• Austen's first three novels to be written — Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey — share a common economic vision, "the danger of losing it all, the chance of hitting it rich, huge losses, huge gains, everything riding on luck and the main chance." (p. 317)

• Austen's later works "explore much more complex economic fictions, sometimes deeply troubling morally, as Austen reflects more widely on social changes brought about by the economic upheavals of the war years and the following post-war adjustments, a time marked by a decline in agricultural profits, an expansion of the credit economy and the sense...that the movement of money was the key to disturbing new shifts in the arrangements of power." pp. 317-318)

• Money comes into view in Austen's novels mainly through the lens of social rank as seen in the use of the term "competence," that is, the minimum amount of money income necessary to live at a particular rank. The question of what constituted a "competence" is frequently discussed, e.g., in Sense and Sensibility between Marianne and Elinor, who have differing ideas. The remainder of the article is a discussion of the kind of life available to those possessing incomes at various levels, from £25 per year for an agricultural laborer to £12,000 per year (Mr. Rushworth in Mansfield Park), and the indicia in the novels in terms of consumption of each level of income. (pp. 319-326)

Chapters 30-35: Nationalism and empire (Warren Roberts), Pastimes (Penny Gay), Philosophy (Peter Knox-Shaw), Politics (Nicholas Roe), Professions (Brian Southam), Psychology (John Mullan)

Chapter 36: Rank (Thomas Keymer)

• Social position is of "consuming importance" in Austen's novels but the concern for social position was expressed in terms predating the class-based language of politics then beginning to be articulated by radicals such as Paine, Owen and Ricardo. The term "class" was already in common use in Austen's time but as yet had the same meaning as such traditional terms as "rank," "station" or "degree." Where the more modern concept of "class" is determined principally by productivity and income, and connotes conflict, the term "rank" focused on lineage and connoted harmony, stability and order. (p. 387)

• Austen more than her predecessors and contemporaries provided an accurate and fully nuanced picture of the system of social rank she knew well. Austen's family included aristocratic ancestors in her mother's family and her brother Edward succeeded to both rank and wealth through his adoption by the Knight family. (pp. 388-389)

• Austen does not have much to do with the highest reaches of the nobility in her novels. "Beneath a peerage of three hundred or so families in England there ranged the graduated demographic on which Austen concentrates her gaze: a gentry society comprising the families of approximately (in 1803) 540 baronets, 350 knights, 6,000 landed squires and 20,000 gentlemen, amounting in total to about 1.4 per cent of the national population and enjoying 15.7 per cent of the national income (Perkin, Modern English Society, pp. 18-22). It is to this rurally based society, centred on major landowning families and descending in fine gradations through non-landed professionals and moneyed rentiers of varying status, that Austen's characters refer when they speak of the 'neighborhood.' In each novel, 'neighborhood' is a feature of both the landscape and its elite population. It denotes both the hierarchy of estates and manors that revolved around the local great house, and the rural gentry who inhabited these places, where they competed for visits from, and invitations to, houses on the level above, and made seasonal forays to London or Bath in pursuit of extended connection." (p. 390)

• Keymer provides an extended discussion of the fine gradations of rank and the way they are portrayed in Austen's novels, including particularly Emma. He then points out the evidence in the novels for the increase in social mobility then beginning to appear in English society: Lady Catherine de Bourgh's insistence that "the distinction of rank [must be] preserved," Elizabeth Bennet's marriage to Darcy although her mother's family was socially undistinguished, Bingley's success in mingling with the Darcys in the higher reaches of the gentry in spite of a family background "in trade," the social advance of Sir William Lucas to a knighthood, and the social and material advancement of naval officers like Admiral Croft and Captain Wentworth. (pp. 390-395).

Chapter 37: Reading practices (Alan Richardson)

• Literacy rates in England climbed gradually throughout the eighteen century, until virtually all members of the aristocracy and gentry could read and, by about 1800, perhaps as many as half of lower class males were literate. (p. 397) During this period, changes in printing technology, in paper manufacturing, in copyright law and in the retail book trade made books far more common and readily available. (p. 401) Austen's novels illustrate the variety of contemporary reading practices, from silent reading in private to quotation and group reading aloud. (p. 403)

• Novel reading, except for a few "best" novels, was condemned widely in the extensive conduct literature for women. Female writers across the ideological spectrum, from Maria Edgeworth to Hannah More, discussed the dangers of novel reading in both polemical works and fiction. (p. 398) Two genres in particular, Gothic novels and novels of sensibility, were thought to have a particularly bad influence on impressionable females. Jane Austen's vigorous defense of novel reading in Northanger Abbey stands out in this context. Austen dealt with each genre and its "dangers" in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility. (399-401)

• Reading is associated throughout Austen's novels with intellectual and moral development. Not all reading practices result in "improvement," however. Those who read superficially in order to accumulate quotations for the purpose of displaying their culture and social status (e.g., Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice) did not benefit from this moral growth. The ideal is expressed by Darcy, who praises the truly accomplished woman who has improved her mind through extensive reading. (p. 402) Women may not read aloud to men in Austen's novels, but may read to each other. (p. 404)

Chapters 38-40: Religion (Michael Wheeler), Trade (Markham Ellis), Transport (Pat Rogers)

Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees

Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees

Introduction: Sharing with Our Neighbors (Deidre Lynch) - This chapter is a justification of the book's topic and an outline of its premises. It has a lot of good "Janeite" details and examples, if we need them.

• Austen has been called the "daughter" of Samuel Johnson and the "mother" of Henry James (9)
• Chapman's edition is the beginning of Austen's prestige; first scholarly edition of an English novelist (9) [more support for this claim]
• "Janeite": coined by literary scholar George Saintsbury - "he meant to equip himself with a badge of honor he could jubilantly pin to his own lapel" (13-14); term is "now used almost exclusively about and against other people" (13)
• Virginia Woolf: "This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room" (Qtd. 23, n. 14)
  

1: The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies (Claudia L. Johnson) - This is essentially the same article as Johnson's "Austen cults and cultures" in the Cambridge Companion. However, it is a more theoretically sophisticated treatment of Austen's "queerness".

• Narrates the 1995 Terry Castle fiasco (27ff.)
  

2: Jane Austen's Friendship (Mary Ann O'Farrell) - This chapter is about friendships in Austen and how readers think of Austen as a friend.
3: Sensibility by the Numbers: Austen's Work as Regency Popular Fiction (Barbara M. Benedict) - This essay is primarily about Austen's novels in relation to other novels carried in circulating libraries; it claims that she embraced many of the tropes of this popular fiction while at the same time undermining them.

• "Austen's novels, albeit written originally for her family and informed by high, as well as popular, literature, were constructed and presented to audiences in the mold of circulating fiction: as the episodic adventures of familiar, sympathetic heroines, designed for a rapid read." (64)
• style: Austen's "narrative sophistication and irony suggested a stylistic compatibility between high literature and popular fiction that challenged—indeed, contradicted—Wordsworth's argument (outlined in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads) that a new literary language was required in order to reach the neglected, common audience." (64)
• high vs. low: "Austen could be seen as hostile to the Romantics' attempts to make authorship an elite profession and so to distinguish themselves from the writers-for-pay employed by such publishers as Minerva Press." (64)

• "Austen's novels, like many others, finesse these distinctions by combining qualities currently successful in circulating novels—the topic of female education and marriage, attention to social ritual, sensitivity to female conduct and internal consciousness, an elite setting—with qualities borrowed from high literature: parody, moral seriousness, topicality." (65)

• circulating library style:

• "Like her fellow writers, Austen herself uses the formula of an opening informational chapter situating her families and heroines in their social context" (75) but "As Austen's mockery makes clear, this schematic characterization adumbrates the plot to come and relieves the reader from having to evaluate ambiguous characters." (76)
• "In general, Austen adheres to the formula of defining her characters by their social circumstances, and physical and moral traits." (76)
• "the reading elicited by circulating fiction increasingly concentrates on plot and characters development" (76); thus Austen "creates dramatic scenes" rather than long descriptions of nature, for example (77)
• "Austen's overarching structure resembles Walter Scott's: a cumulative action segmented into a three-tiered novel, with patches of description and dramatic dialogue, and a climax at the end of each volume." (78)

• Austen wrote fast-paced plots to encourage readers to read quickly, since borrowers only had a limited time with the book (82)
• Because circulating libraries often used catalogues that only listed a novel's name, Austen chose titles that would have resonance for her readers; abstract comparisons like "sense and sensibility" were part of a moralistic tradition and eponymous heroine names were part of a new romantic novel tradition (69-73)
  

4: Austen's Earliest Readers and the Rise of the Janeites (William Galperin) - This essay discusses initial reactions to Austen in light of the debate over her "realism." He claims, agreeing with Armstrong, that "the real" and "realism" was defined by later Austen readers and partially through her works (91).

• realism of Austen is a later construction: "the responses of Austen's earliest readers . . . suggest that both realistic practice and the protocols of reading texts that are nominally probabilistic were neither as entrenched nor as ideologically hidebound at the moment of their inception as is customarily assumed" (90)
• early works reviewed as didactic and overly particular: "The reviews and comments regarding Austen's earliest published works, Sense and Sensibility (1812) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), seem almost split at times between the obligation to credit these works with a didactic purpose (which their prescriptive titles encourage) and a nearly transgressive attention to particularity independent of either plot or instruction." (91)
• Scott's role in Austen's realist reception: "Unlike some of Austen's lay readers, who recognized her divergence from realistic practice as it had been prescribed and defined at the time, Walter Scott may well have been the first to install Austen as the realist par excellence." (96)
• Emma' was celebrated as description of the "everyday" and the "common" and its plot was recognized as insignificant (98)

• However, "the majority of respondents" were "put off by the many details (especially the particulars recounted by Miss Bates) and by the relative lack of incident in the text" (102)

• Austen's conservative stance: "the largely conservative conceptions of both Austen's achievement and the motives behind her writing would by turns come to represent something of a consensus that not even feminist criticism in our time has succeeded in overturning. Thus it is instructive to remember and to stress that for earlier reders, including those who, though chronologically proximate to Austen, were able with the benefit of only some hindsight to read her with the special attention that her novels attract and display, Austen's writing was palpably at cross-purposes with the hegemonic ends of what we have come in retrospect to regard as realistic writing." (108)
• Endorses Johnson's queer reading (109-10)
• General statements:

• P&P: "what is arguably her most successfully conservative work" (94)
• MP: her "ostensibly most didactic novel" (94)
• 1833 publication of Richard Bentley's Standard Novels "marked Austen's formal inclusion in the canon of essential European fiction" (105-6)
  

5: Decadent Austen Entails: Forster, James, Firbank, and the 'Queer Taste' of Sandition (Clara Tuite) - This is another queer reading of Austen; as it is quite esoteric at points, I don't think that the major argument works for wikipedia.

• genre: "country-house novel": "that bourgeois realist genre initiated by Austen, which plots the transmission of landed family property and dissects the complicated crossings of class, gender, and generation ensuring that transmission" (115-16)

• "the country-house novel, as a bourgeois and feminized historical displacement of both the pastoral and the georgic that shares those genres' preoccupation with natural, social, and economic modes of patrilineal reproduction" (120)

• Sandition: "Fantasizing the complete dissolution of landed property under the sign and in the the endlessly circulating form sof coastal real estate, and failing to redeem the landed estate from that fate, Sandition departs dramatically from the conventions of the country-house genre" (116)
• politics and genre: "the Austen country-house novel performed the critical cultural function during the Napoleonic period of lyricizing and naturalizing a Burkean ideology of social hierarchy that involved the recommendation of the culture of the aristocratic estate as a form of national culture." (118)
• Austen's works: "the almost parodically formulaic heterosexual romance" (119)
• another version of the canonization timeline: "1890 marks the initiatory gesture of the specifically critical canonization of Austen, with the publication of Goldwin Smith's Life of Jane Austen for the Macmillan Great Writers Series." (119)
• Henry James and E. M. Forster were heavily influenced by Austen (121ff.); James helped canonize Austen with his critical writings (122)
  

6: The Virago Jane Austen (Katie Trumpener) - This chapter is primarily about Austen's place within the canon of women writers and the formation of that canon. Again, it is quite specific at points - beyond the scope of wikipedia.

• "By the early twentieth century, Austen was generally read as a complacent, if witty, conservative, a miniaturist who 'liked everything to be tidy and pleasant and comfortable around her.'" (143)
• In printing a series of books by 19th and 20th century writers and positioning Austen as their progenitor, "Virago Modern Classics has implicitly argued for an earlier, powerfully feminist reappraisal of Austen" (144)
• 1890s - publication of Austen's novels renewed interest in her (145)
• MP: "Although now often reread as a novel engaged with the events of its day—in the Caribbean—Mansfield Park used to be viewed as Austen's most quietist, ahistorical work." (154)
• A series of women writers around the turn of the twentieth century rewrote Austen. EX: E. M. Delafield, in The Optimist, and F. M. Mayor, in The Rector's Daughter (154ff.)
  

7: Free and Happy: Jane Austen in America (Mary A. Favret) - This chapter is about Austen reception in America; it asks primarily, "what is the American Austen" and "why do Americans like Austen"?

• "a tradition among American readers who sever Austen's ties with England and accommodate her to an American perspective, a view that aligns itself with innovation, technical and technological master, and an almost scientific objectivity that operates at a distance form social convention and emotions; readers also incorporate Austen into the pursuit of pleasure, consumer choice, and the possibility of creating a new world." (177-178)

• EX: William Dean Howells and Agnes Repplier (others are more obscure)

• However, embracing Austen has also allowed Americans to deny slavery and its effects; accepting Austen means writing race out of history. (182)
  

8: In Face of All the Servants: Spectators and Spies in Austen (Roger Sales) - This article uses recent film adaptations of Austen to raise new questions about the role of servants in the novels; arguing that the films offer a new perspective on the servants, it then turns to the novels to ask deeper questions than have previously been asked about class in Austen. It also offers some general comments on the adaptations, amounting to criticisms of how they fail to live up to the complexity of the novels.

• Heroes are foregrounded in Austen TV and film adaptations in a way that denies Austen's heroines their pride of place. (188-89)
• Villains are instantly recognized in the TV and film adaptations, disrupting the tension of the original text. There is no suspense (189; 193).
• Films offer the viewer the servant's perspective, particularly those that linger on dinner scenes when the camera circles the family as the servants do (190-91).
• The 1995 Persuasion adaptation in particular emphasizes the sheer number of servants required for these estates (they are constantly walking through scenes) and the way in which their presence made private life public (192-93).
• "Hollywood adaptations of Austen, going back to the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, have always privileged romance and character (shading into caricature) over loving attempts to reproduce what passes for historical, heritage detail." (194)
• In turning from the films to the novels, Sales argues that the films offer us a new window into the servants in Austen. He argues that they are more powerful than have previously been thought. EX: Mrs. Yonge in P&P and the servant who helps with Brandon's elopement in S&S
  

9: Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism (Susan Fraiman) - This article questions some of Said's assumptions regarding MP while still agreeing with his overarching thesis that Austen and other novelists "made colonialism thinkable by constructing the West as center, home, and norm, while pushing everything else to the margins" (209).

• "Said's opinion that Austen is culpably indifferent to slavery in Antigua depends on a repeated but questionable assertion: that Mansfield Park epitomizes moral order and right human relations" (209)

• Fraiman sees Austen critiquing MP: The novel is "an inquiry into Mansfield's corruption that challenges the ethical basis for its authority both at home and, by implication, overseas." (211)
• Edmund and Fanny live at Thornton Lacy, not MP, at the end, suggesting "Austen's wish to register, even at the end, some disdain for what Mansfield represents" (211)

• For Fraiman, the main dynamic of the book is the tug of war between Sir Thomas and Fanny, therefore the novel questions the place and morality of the landowner that Said thinks Austen is endorsing (212).
• Fraiman's reading of the slavery lines: "My view . . . is that Austen deliberately invokes the dumbness of Mansfield Park concerning its own barbarity precisely because she means to rebuke it. The barbarity she has in mind is not literal slavery in the West Indies but a paternal practice she depicts as possibly analogous to it: Sir Thomas's bid (successful in Maria's case if not in Fanny's) to put female flesh on the auction block in exchange for male status." (212)

• See also Jane Fairfax's comment in Emma regarding white slavery to support this reading (213).

• The chapter also critiques Said's blindness towards the role of women and feminism in imperialism. Fraiman argues that Austen's position as a dispossessed woman gave her an outsider's view of Britain and its empire. She sees anti-imperialist elements in Austen's criticism of provinciality and narrowness of vision (214-17).

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈===Armstrong===

Armstrong—Desire and Domestic Fiction

Nancy Armstrong revolutionized the study of the novel. Her book Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that the modern individual is a construct of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Relying on the work of Michel Foucault, she contends that "sexuality is a cultural construct and as such has a history" (8). Building on this assumption, she argues "that written representations of the self allowed the modern individual to become an economic and psychological reality" (8) and "that the modern individual was first and foremost a woman”. (8) Perhaps her most important point is that subjectivity is constituted through language, specifically the printed word (again, this idea has debt to Foucault) (25). In the section of her book on Austen, she compares and contrasts Emma with Richardson's Pamela and contends that the novel demonstrates the power of language to construct and deconstruct communities and selves.

• Austen's novel are part of a longer tradition of fiction that emphasizes marriage and conduct (e.g. Burney); this separates her work from authors like Richardson and Heywood (134).
• Austen's novels empower all readers to interpret their experiences and construct their own subjectivity (136).
• Austen's own language is pivotal to the creation of this process of subject formation: rather than representing a variety of dialects, she uses her own "polite standard for English" to demonstrate that communities are formed and broken through language (138).
• Social connections and disconnections occur in Austen's novels because of proper and improper reading (138). Ex: Emma does not understand Mr. Elton's charade and Darcy's two letters to Elizabeth (138).
• There are two competing discourses in Austen's novels: feminine and masculine. Characters such as Emma and Mr. Knightley compete throughout the novel to force their interpretations of events on the community and to construct the subjectivities of those around them. EX: Mr. Knightley argues that Harriet has no money, no status and respectability. Emma argues that Harriet, through education, can be made into a respectable woman and sees some element of this in her inherently. (139-41) Emma and Mr. Knightley learn from each other, though; Knightley learns to respect Harriet and Emma Mr. Martin (151).

• Further ex: Fanny and Edmund vis à vis the Crawfords in Mansfield Park. Edmund learns more than Fanny, who sees the Crawfords more clearly. Simmaren 23:15, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

• Although part of the conduct book tradition, Austen's novels question some of its assumption. Harriet, for example, is the self-educated woman who constructed her own identity, but she is not the heroine and the novel questions the extent to which such self-formation is possible (144).
• Writing in Emma is "an agent of social disruption" and its value lies in its ability to communicate a person's inner feelings directly. This valorizes the genre of the novel itself. (148)
• Emma "castigates behavior that has been prompted by social motivation" (154). EX: Mrs. Elton

• Query the meaning of "social motivation" - social climbing in this case? Or a desire to advance in society by pushing others down? Simmaren 23:15, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

• I believe that "social motivation" here is a fancy way of saying something like "peer pressure" or "keeping up with the Jones's". Awadewit

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Butler

Butler―Jane Austen and the War of Ideas

In the Introduction to the 1987 edition of her book, Butler herself describes her purpose as showing that the novels of Austen's time, including her own, "were full of signs which conveyed opinions", ["Introduction," p. xiv] that "the practices of novelists in the late eighteenth century were less aesthetic, less separate from society, than modern critics are in the habit of insisting on." [xiv] In the first part of the book, she reviews the ideological premises embodied in several types of popular fiction that preceded Austen—sentimental novels, the radical or Jacobin novels of the 1790s, and the anti-radical novels of the 1790s and later—and presents an extended discussion of Maria Edgeworth. Austen's three early novels (S&S, P&P and NA), "[t]hrough their plots, characterization, and structure, and in their didactic leaning, ...resemble more programatically conservative women's novels." [xiv-xv] In the second part of the book, Butler presents her evidence that Austen "participates in a conservative reaction against more permissive, individualistic, and personally expressive novel types of earlier years." [xv] Butler uses the word "participation" because, while Austen's personal opinions on these issues are unknown, "she chose to write novels of a particular pre-existent type, and chose to publish them." [xv]

• Butler argues that for much of the eighteen century, English novelists used a mixture of liberal and conservative motifs, "often it seems with the intention of avoiding a taint of partisanship which was certainly at times unpopular." [xv] Beginning in the 1760s and particularly in the 1790s, "[b]oth novels and poetry are invaded by partisans of both sides; plain, communicable signs mark a polarized political alignment, which is then picked up by reviewers and passed on to the readers as indeed the meaning of the book. [xv-xvi]

• "Austen's first critics and other readers picked up her novels' signs, which they understood not because they knew anything whatsoever about her private intentions, but because her novels deviated in detail from the detail of other novels like them. Her leading characters were depicted in stylized, familiar social situations; the reader, identifying with the character, was taught a code of behavior which was not universal, for readers of other current books understood the alternatives. Austen's stress upon her heroines' subordinate role in a family, upon their dutifulness, meditativeness, self-abnegation, and self-control, were codes shared with other conservative writers, especially women moralists such as Jane West and Mary Brunton. The acquiescent heroine challenges the hero or heroine of novels of the 1790s by reformists such as Bage, Godwin, Holcraft, Hays, and Wollstonecraft, who insist on thinking independently and speaking out." [xvi]

• Butler describes her book as "pre-feminist in tone and strategy" [xx] and sees her main methodological contribution as having been her focus on the political and social context in which JA's novels and other fiction were written. She credits herself and (perhaps) Alastair Duckworth (The Improvement of the Estate) as having begun this trend in scholarship. [p. xx]

• Butler distinguishes herself from (and criticizes) Margaret Kirkham (Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction). In Butler's view, Kirkham is as interested in "establishing Austen's proper intellectual context" as Butler, [xxii] but limits her view of context to "the feminist controversy of 1788 to 1810." [xx] Kirkham sees Austen as the exponent in fiction of the "Enlightenment feminism" of which Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft were the principal figures. Butler rejects the idea that a single feminism during this period embraced both Wollstonecraft and Austen, "though I do believe in the existence of different ideologies in which perceptions of the nature and role of women played an important part...." [xxiii] Butler feels that Jane Rendall (The Origins of Modern Feminism) presents a more complete and (therefore more satisfactory) description of "Enlightenment feminism" that includes Maria Edgeworth but (properly, in Butler's view) not Jane Austen. One reason for rejecting the limitations of Kirkham's narrow view is the existence of "a Tory women's tradition, which must also be thought of as proto-feminist, for it was conscious that women were treated as an inferior class in a man's world. It met this situation first by urging self-cultivation on women, a moral and spiritual strength; second, by giving them a religiously-sanctioned role of service, both to family and (through teaching and charitable work) to the community." [xxiii] Jane Austen is properly viewed as a member of this group. [xxiii]

• Butler presents a short summary of femiminist criticism and its intersection with Austen criticism. [xxiv-xxxiii] She appreciates Poovey' The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, because "Poovey . . . brought a new precision and sophistication to the relationship between individual wporks and their circumambient culture; her treatment is admirable because it shows three approximate contemporaries (Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Austen) reacting to a similar pressure (the ideal of feminine propriety), but in varying, ideosyncratic terms and with different artistic techniques." [xxiv-xxv] Butler feels that Shelley (not a realist novelist) and Wollstonecraft (not primarily a novelist) are not the best comparisons for Austen, and that Poovey's concept of "propriety" is too much influenced by Marxist and Foucaultian ideology. [xxv] Butler then goes on to discuss in detail Patricia Spacks' The Female Imagination, Ellen Moers' Literary Women, Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, and Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic. [xxv-xxxiii]

• In rejecting Elaine Showalter's conclusion that "a continuous women's tradition can be spoken of only for writers born after 1800 . . . that women writers before that date could not consider themselves professionals and therefore . . . could not relate to other women writers", [Butler's summary, xxvii] Butler asks: "Could Sterne (say) have thought of himself as more a professional writer, or more closely linked with other novelists, or more bound to operate within fixed generic conventions, than Eliza Haywood or Charlotte Smith? Surely not. Even if it is easy to underrate the professionalism of novelists, women writers had also established themselves as dramatists in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Behn, Manley and Centlivre group were unquestionably aware professionals. Equally, many women writers in all periods from the mid-seventeenth century were aware of one another's existence. There was always a women writer's network, though not all women writers belonged to it, and Austen herself, significantly, did not." [Butler makes clear her understanding that Austen read widely among women writers and therefore was aware of their existence, so "belonging" in this context means something else.] [xxvii]

• "The last decade or so [ending 1987] of applied feminist criticism has made it imperative for a critic coming now to the subject to ask whether the most appropriate context for Austen's work is all-female: either simply women's writing, or her own specialized genre of woman-centred fiction. As a historical critic I am opposed to the construction of enclosed enclaves for women's writing, on terms which would then have seemed unnatural. The eighteenth-century novel in England especially was already, thanks to the preponderance of women readers, a feminized genre. But it was no less, as we have seen, a series that interacted with other series, such as the discourses of political theory and of behaviour, religion, and morals, and these were not overall feminized to the same degree as novels were. To read an Austen novel as only a woman's novel is, then, to read it selectively. But not to read it as among other things a woman's novel is also, as feminist criticism has taught all of us, to leave a proper historical dimension out." [xxxiii]

• Butler believes that a considered view of "Tory feminism" must begin as far back as "Mary Astell and the remarka[b]le Tory generation of dramatists, poets and polemicists fostered by the last half-century of Stewart courts." [xxxiii]

• Butler believes that a comparison of Jane Austen with Maria Edgeworth demonstrates the former's affinities with the group Butler identifies as Tory feminist writers. [Butler makes the comparison in detail, pp. xxxiv-xlii]

• In depicting marriage, Edgeworth was influenced by French models, particularly Mme. de Stael, as evidenced by Leonora (1806) and Vivian (1812), in which adultery, seduction, physical longing and frigidity are important elements. "Austen, then, did not have only inhibited, 'proper' English models to follow, she had Edgeworth's more French, Enlightenment exemple, and she left it largely alone. . . . Among Austen's many lacunae is the young woman who is sexually active." [xxxviii]

• Butler notes the absence in Austen's novels of women mentors and authority figures. "Women in Austen don't age well—none is shown having grown to wisdom through experience, or even exercising authority over servants or children. Collectively, Austen's women are oddly and even unnaturally ineffective." [xl] Austen's heroines marry authority figures, but "Austen does not even hint at what Edgeworth likes to demonstrate, that the wife will share her husband's authority by sharing his work." [xli]

• Butler now feels (1987, the time of the new introduction) that marriage is structurally much less important to the last three novels (MP, E, P) than to the first three (S & S, P & P, NA). [xliii] More important is a new theme, society at large. "Austen increasingly looks in her last few years like a social commentator...." [xliii-xliv] Austen did not identify herself with the large landowners and the upper clergy, but with the "cadet branch of the gentry," the new professionals (like her brothers) emerging from the lower ranks of the gentry. [p. xliv]

Chapter 1 ("Sentimentalism: The Radical Inheritance") is a summary of the sentimental English novel of the mid-to-late eighteenth century, one of the traditions Jane Austen inherited. Butler argues that "[a]lmost every novelist of Jane Austen's day is in some degree or other in the most literal sense a reactionary" with respect to this tradition. [p. 8] Butler discusses in detail the works of Henry Mackenzie, a Scottish "man of letters," as illustrative of the major characteristics of the sentimental novelists: the belief that man's instincts are fundamentally good, dislike of dogma, intellectuality, political liberalism. [11-15]

Chapter 2 ("The Jacobin Novel: Revolution and Reason") provides an overview of the English progressive novelists writing in the 1790s. Butler discusses the works of Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, Robert Bage, Elizabeth Inchbald, and feminists Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hay.

• The so-called English jacobin novelists reject the focus of the sentimentalists on the subjective life of the individual in favor of a "resolute rationality, [and] suspicion of the uncontrollable workings of the unconscious mind."[33] "[I]n the novel the revolutionaries voluntarily limit themselves, with the result that their subversion—like their artistic achievement—goes only so far." [32-33] Butler attributes this in part to fashion and in part to a reaction against the psychology of Hume, Gibbon and the other major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. [34-35]

• Butler also identifies a reaction against the emotionalism of Burke (she describes him as a sentimental writer) as a factor. [37-39] "No doubt one effect of Burke's tactics was to drive his opponents towards a sometimes exaggerated posture of rationality." [39] Additional factors were the lower-middle class origins of many of the jacobin novelists and in several cases their Evangelical sympathies. [pp. 42-43]

• Unlike their French and German contemporaries, English progressive novelists were relatively prudish in matters of sexual passion, "because they believed in reason, and were mistrustful of the the irrational" [45] and because of the Puritanism in sexual matters characteristic of English middle and lower-middle classes and English Evangelicals. [45] Subsequently, this would lead to attacks on the aristocracy not (at first) for its domination of political institutions but for the licentiousness of its private life. [45]

• Butler briefly discusses works by Godwin (Political Justice), Elizabeth Inchbald (A Simple Story and Nature and Art), Mary Wollstonecraft (The Wrongs of Women) [pp. 45-56]

Chapter 3 ("The Jacobin Novel: Caleb Williams and Hermsprong") centers on these two works by Godwin and Bage. "[T]he proof of their radical allegiance lies in the strong moral preference they show for what is private and individual. Each of them locates the action of his story within the consciousness of certain central characters, who learn (with the author's approval) to trust their own perceptions above the established codes of society." [p. 57]

Chapter 4 ("The Anti-Jacobins") begins with The Anti-Jacobin, a polemical periodical edited during the mid-1790s by George Canning, William Gifford and Hookham Frere. [89]

• The conservative attack on the "Jacobins" as subversives included as victims such well-known literary figures as Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, Richard Payne Knight and Erasmus Darwin. [88-92]

• The conservatives also directly attacked contemporary German dramatists, including Kotzebue and Goethe. [92-93]

• "In discussing the use made of [Kotzebue's] Lover's Vows in Mansfield Park (1814), modern commentators sometimes underrate how notorious it was; how critics and satirists from The Anti-Jacobin on had made it a byword for moral and social subversion." [93]

• In comparing Jane Austen's work with The New Morality, a poem published in The Anti-Jacobin, Butler comments that "Austen's strong liking for the actual—that virtually moral distaste which she displays, from the juvenilia on, for the romantic gloss on truth—is a characteristic partisan position of the time. Her development of the clever heroine, who strives, though often fallibly, for a clear-sighted assessment of human weakness, including her own, is also typical, and not the idiosyncratic taste of one original talent." [93-94]

• Butler says that among the anti-jacobins, Burke's highly emotional style was disfavored. [94] Butler disputes Alistair Duckworth's finding that Austen was heavily influenced by Burke: "Jane Austen and Burke had in common their social conservatism, but in manner they were antithetical." [95]

Chapter 5 ("Maria Edgeworth") discusses what Butler feels is Maria Edgeworth's ambiguous place within the political spectrum Butler has been discussing. By the diagnostic criteria Butler identified in earlier chapters (valuing the individual, the external social world viewed through the consciousness of a single individual, a social environment which "at best puts pressure on the hero, at worst imprisons him" [124]), "Maria Edgeworth is unquestionably a Jacobin." [124] Yet Butler argues that Edgeworth's novels do not belong unequivocally on one side or the other of the political divide and are "far more nearly bi-partisan than Jane Austen...." [124] Edgeworth and Scott are usually thought of as more political than Jane Austen, but "neither wrote novels as typical of one side or the other as Jane Austen's are." [p. 124]

• Butler provides details of Edgeworth's background and influences [124-126] and discusses her principal written works, including Letters for Literary Ladies [126-132], her writings for children [132], Practical Education [132-137], an unpublished play Whim for Whim [137-138], Forester [138-140], Belinda [140-145], and Leonora [145-153].

• "Maria Edgeworth thus shares the optimistic view of man of the earlier sentimental generation, while rejecting—like Bage, Godwin, Holcroft, and the feminists—the irrational psychology of that movement. She believes in the individual man's capacity for great virtue, but conceives that he realizes his potential by a conscious exercise of reason, and not by the so-called 'moral instinct'." [137-138]

• "Anti-jacobin female novelists, Mrs. West and Mrs. Hamilton, previously deployed their characters neatly according to their respective ideologies, and set a heroine to choose a husband among them. Maria Edgeworth achieves something more detailed and distinctive by putting language, and especially dialogue, to full use in this process of assessment: her characters act out the people they are by their manner of using words." [143]

• Maria Edgeworth, like Jane Austen, is concerned to provide accurate details in her fiction.

• "Maria Edgeworth, like Jane Austen, wastes few words describing a setting, but, again like Jane Austen, she strains every nerve to command the reader's acceptance. The sense of contemporary actuality is fortified by street-names in real towns; consistent dates, culled from almanacks; journeys, timed with atlases and time-tables; lawsuits, carefully checked with legal experts." [155]

• "What is more, though her physical settings are not by Victorian standards specific, Maria Edgeworth is literal to a degree about the economic circumstances of people's lives. We nearly always know about their incomes, their jobs or professions (if any), their precise class status, their appropriate daily pursuits. The salvation of Edgeworth characters tends to be worked out in explicitly material terms." [156]

Chapter 6 ("Seeing a Meaning") begins Butler's detailed discussion of Jane Austen and her work. Butler describes what she sees as a critical consensus of the last century, that Jane Austen is not interested in "the broad concerns of national life." [161] Butler argues that this supposed detachment was what her contemporaries saw when they read her work. [161]

• Richard Whately, one of her earliest reviewers, was clear that Austen was an orthodox Christian. He praises her not for being detached from political and social controversy but for being better than other contemporary novelists at presenting her views unobtrusively. [p. 162]

• In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Evangelicalism became effective as a powerful upper-middle class pressure group supporting reform of abuses and opposing vice. Whether or not Austen was sympathetic to Evangelical religion, her works reflect society's growing seriousness of tone and desire for reform. [162-164] Butler's purpose is "to show that[Austen's] manner as a novelist is broadly that of the conservative Christian moralist of the 1790s...." [164]

• Butler asserts that the "world of the last novel [Persuasion] reflects the moral influence of the rising middle class [citing the hostile remark about William Walter Elliott's "Sunday traveling"], and is subtly different from the laxer, more permissive social atmosphere of the three novels Jane Austen began before 1800." [163]

• One measure of a progressive or a conservative writer is "whether the plot, broadly, suggests a victim suffering at the hands of society [progressive], or a misguided individual rebelling against it [conservative]." [166-67] Butler argues [pp. 165-167] that the latter describes all of Austen's novels. Butler divides Austen's work into two parts: plots involving a "Heroine who is Right" and a spokesman for conservative orthodoxy, and plots involving a "Heroine who is Wrong." [166]

• "Heroines who are Right" include Elinor Dashwood (S & S), Fanny Price (MP) and Anne Elliott (Persuasion). [166]

• "Heroines who are Wrong" include Catherine Morland (NA), Elizabeth Bennet (P & P), and Emma Woodhouse (Emma). These characters begin in error and finish by understanding their errors and resolving to avoid them in the future by following reason. [166]

• In the novels where the "Heroine is Right," the same process of error, self-knowledge and resolve to follow reason is present, but in another principal character or characters: Marianne Dashwood (S & S), Edmund and Sir Thomas Bertram (MP), and Frederick Wentworth and Lady Russell (Persuasion). The "Heroine who is Right" helps bring about the change in these other characters. [166]

Chapter 7 ("The Juvenilia and Northanger Abbey") Most of the Juvenilia seem to have been written as humorous pieces based on "that favorite eighteenth-century comic recourse, extreme verbal incongruity." [168] Love and Freindship is different—undoubtedly "a tilt at both form and content" [168] of the sentimental novel. Austen's presentation of Laura, the main character, is intended "above all to expose the selfishness of the sentimental system. Here is a heroine governed by self-admiration, and aware only of those others so similar in tastes and temperament that she can think of them as extensions of herself. Her rejection of the claims of the rest of humanity arises either from hostility to those who try to thwart her, or from unawareness of the claims of anyone outside the charmed circle of sentimental friendship." [169] Austen does not suggest that her sentimental heroines are insincere. "In her view the contradiction is inherent in the creed: she wants to show that the realization of self, an apparently idealistic goal, is in fact necessarily destructive and delusory." [169-170]

Butler describes Catherine, or the Bower as the first recognizable effort at the classic Jane Austen form of novel. The heroine is inexperienced, "on the threshold of life." The story describes her initial naiveté and her developing ability to understand the false sentimental friendship offered by Camilla Stanley and the dishonesty of Camilla's brother Edward, a potential lover. Austen uses conversation about literature to establish an implicit moral frame of reference—Catherine uses Camilla's comments about literature as a basis for making moral judgments about her. The dialog in this story "often approximates to 'free indirect speech.'" This story also is "the first example of Jane Austen's technique of comparing the evidence given to the mind with the mind's insidious habit of perverting evidence: two planes of reality, the objective and subjective, respectively presented in dialogue and in a form which approaches internal monologue." [pp. 170-172]

Northanger Abbey fits the same pattern: "A naive, inexperienced heroine stands at the threshold of life and needs to discriminate between true friends and false. The evidence she is given are words and the system of values they express....Like Catherine, it uses literary conversation not for the sake of the subject, but in order to give an appropriate morally objective ground against which character can be judged." [173]

• In NA, Catherine has five important conversations about the Gothic novel. In all of these instances, Austen asks the reader, not to criticize certain novels o the habit of novel-reading, but "to consider the habits of mind which the different speakers reveal." [173]
• Butler describes an important difference between the two halves of NA: in the first volume, only the reader is enlightened by the conversations between the characters, while in the second, Catherine comes to understand clearly the things Henry Tilney has been saying ("The visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened.") and assess correctly her own errors. "This, then, is the typical moment of éclaircissement towards which all the Austen actions tend, the moment when a key character abandons her error and humbly submits to objective reality." [176]
• Butler feels that "Jane Austen was slower to handle the inner life confidently than to deploy dialog", [177] a problem common to NA and Pride & Prejudice, where Austen "fails to give Elizabeth's train of thought with the same clarity and brilliance with which [she] presents the dialogue." [177] However, NA "establishes the antiphonal role of dialogue and free indirect speech which is to be so important in Jane Austen's career. It deploys characters around the heroine with the kind of antithetical precision that is typical of Mrs. West, but much more amusingly and naturally." [177-178]
• NA is an anti-jacobin novel, but a subtle one. Austen avoided the stock character of anti-jacobin fiction, the main character who professes the new ideology. Instead, she developed her own version of the revolutionary, "the man or woman who by acting on a system of selfishness, threatens friends of more orthodox principles; and, ultimately, through cold-blooded cynicism in relation to the key social institution of marriage, threatens human happiness at a very fundamental level." [180] Equally importantly, these characters find support where they ought to be most actively opposed, among those who observe the forms of orthodoxy but ignore its substance. [180]

Chapter 8 (Sense & Sensibility)

• In structure, S&S is a didactic novel based on the contrast between the beliefs and conduct of two central characters, a novel format that was particularly fashionable in 1795-1796, the period in which the first version of S&S was written. [182]
• "[T]he issue between the two contrasted sisters is presented according to the view of the nature-nurture dichotomy usually adopted by conservatives. The contrast, as always, is between two modes of perception. On the one hand, Marianne's way is subjective, intuitive, implying confidence in the natural goodness of human nature when untrammelled by convention. Her view is corrected by the more cautious orthodoxy of Elinor, who mistrusts her own desires, and requires even her reason to seek the support of objective evidence." [188]
• Elinor "advocate[s] a doctrine of civility in opposition to Marianne's individualism." [188] This is a characteristically anti-jacobin theme. [188]
• "Elinor is the first character in an Austen novel consistently to reveal her inner life. The narrative mode of Sense & Sensibility is the first sustained example of 'free indirect speech,' for the entire action is refracted through Elinor's consciousness as Northanger Abbey could not be through the simple-minded Catherine's. Other technical changes necessarily follow. Dialogue is far less important in Sense & Sensibility, since the heroine is not so much in doubt about the nature of external truth, as concerned with the knowledge of herself, her passions, and her duty." [189-190]
• Marianne is not a typical anti-jacobin representative of the doctrine of sensibility, because of her affectionate nature and intelligence (and not least because she survives her self-centered mistakes). "Because Marianne is not representative, other characters are needed . . . to show the system of self in full-blooded action. Jane Austen provides them in the group of characters who fawn upon and virtually worship that false idol compounded of materialism, status-seeking and self-interest, Mrs Ferrars." [192-193]

Chapter 9 (Pride & Prejudice)

• Butler begins with a summary of the various interpretative approaches to this novel. According to Butler, most of the prior critics agree, on one basis or another, that Jane Austen was associated intellectually with Elizabeth Bennet's individuality and rebelliousness. [197-203]
• The novel presents many antitheses (EX: Elizabeth versus Darcy, Elizabeth and Darcy versus Bingley and Jane, Darcy and Lady Catherine de Burgh (old money and status) versus the Gardiners (rising middle class). These are not parallel, however, but tend to overlap or cut across one another. [203-204]
• Contrary to popular readings of the novel, Darcy and Elizabeth are not polar opposites but in most respects are very much alike: both look upon others with "a very satirical eye," both are intelligent, both suffer from a moral complacency towards themselves, both are proud (Darcy of his social standing, taste and intelligence, Elizabeth of her intelligence, independence and perceptions). [205-210] However, of the two, Darcy's "pride and prejudice" (though excessive) "was still in its own way more reasonable, more based on evidence, than [Elizabeth's]." [210]
• As with other Austen heroines, Elizabeth goes through a process of error, recognition of error, and remorse and determination to do better in the future. The classic example: She comes to understand that she was mistaken about Wickham. In examining her own mental processes, she realizes that she has never viewed him objectively. She never attempted to check Wickham's story against objective evidence. She understands that apart from her stubbornly maintained feelings of antipathy for Darcy, she has no objective reason to dislike or reject him. [208] "She grew absolutely ashamed of herself.—Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd. 'How despicably have I acted!' she cried.—'I, who have prided myself on my discernment!...Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either was concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.'"[quoted on 208]
• The central antithesis of the book is between the two pairs of protagonists: Elizabeth and Darcy on the one hand, Jane and Bingley on the other. Jane and Bingley are notably modest and inclined to think well of others. Elizabeth and Darcy are proud and "satirical," that is, they have a low opinion of others. Out of this contrast, Jane Austen presents her view of the truly Christian character, who possesses the perceptiveness (and perhaps skepticism) about people of E/D and the charity towards others and humility of J/B. [210-12] Austen's moral ideal is clear: "it is most nearly approached by Darcy and Elizabeth at the point when they have acknowledged the necessity of Jane and Bingley's humility and candour." [212] This is "a view of human nature that derives from orthodox Christian pessimism, not progressive optimism" about the nature of man. [212]
• In P & P, Austen mocks the idea of love at first sight: - "It is possible that Jane Austen meant to ridicule the hackneyed theme by standing it on its head: what she offers is hate at first sight." [213] To Austen, "Both are emotional responses, built on insufficient or wrong evidence, and fostered by pride and complacency toward the unreliable subjective consciousness." [213]
• "It is a truth universally acknowledged . . ." is a theme that Lady Catherine and Mrs Bennet share across the social divide: "both are venal about marriage, and blind to its moral significance for the individuals concerned." [213] "Marriage at the end of a conservative novel should be, and is, the fulfilment of a personal moral quest." [214] At the end of the "error-error recognized-remorse-determination" cycle, the newly enlightened heroine uses good judgment and external evidence to select a partner in marriage, usually a guardian figure. Marriage of this type usually involves a clergyman or landowner and a commitment to take a leading role in society. [214-215]
• Free indirect speech is strikingly absent from P&P. Austen relies almost completely on dialog for both narrative and interpretation - her viewpoint is largely external to the characters. "The clues for a right reading of the characters are present in conversation for anyone acute enough to pick them up." [216] Because of this, many readers do not understand how critical Austen was of Elizabeth's mode of thinking. Unlike Mr. Knightley in Emma, there is no principal character to act as a foil to Elizabeth and a benchmark and reminder of what is objectively true or proper. [216-217]

Chapter 10 (Mansfield Park)

• The beginning of MP must have suggested to contemporaries that the work was simply another novel by a woman about female education. Butler cites a variety of contemporary novelists who took this as their theme: Mrs. West, Mrs. Inchbald, Fanny Burney, and Maria Edgeworth among others. Their novels criticized female education centered on such superficial qualities as "accomplishments" and "wit" or "cleverness" intended to prepare females for the marriage market. [219-20]
• Plot summary: The plot of MP is built around the contrast between the education of the Bertram sisters and its consequences. The first part of the novel, until Sir Thomas' return from Antigua, "is about the entry into life of the two Bertram sisters: their education, their values, and, especially, their inability to resist the worldly baits proffered by the Crawfords. In the second, slightly longer part, Fanny, the exemplary heroine, encounters in her turn the temptation of Henry's love, and Mary's friendship, and prevails." [220-221]
• The difference between Austen and the other female novelists concerned with female education is that their heroines are rationalists while Fanny Price is a Christian. Fanny exhibits both a Christian humility and, as always with Austen's heroines, an impulse toward self-knowledge. [221-222] "Fanny's sense as a Christian of her own frailty, her liability to error, and her need for guidance outside herself, is the opposite of the Bertram girls' complacent self-sufficiency." [222]
• The Crawfords represent yet another kind of "citified" education: sophisticated, worldly, "modern," cynical, materialistic, self-gratifying, essentially amoral. The early part of the novel presents a triple contrast among the cynical Crawfords, the selfish Bertram girls, and Christian Fanny. [222-23] "Whatever the topic of dialogue, the moral landscape of the various characters is what receives attention." [223] In the early dialog, three key topics recur that are typical of anti-jacobin novels of the 1790s: Nature, religion and marriage. [224] "The action of the novel is so entirely bound up with the value-systems of the various characters that they are always to a greater or lesser extent illustrating, acting out, their beliefs." [227]
• In Butler's view, the theatrical sequence (Lovers' Vows) "is the most masterly part of Mansfield Park." [229] In particular, Austen does something new: the novel's viewpoint leaves Fanny for extended periods and enters the minds of a variety of other characters. [229-30] "There is no other comparable sequence of a Jane Austen novel so independent of the heroine." [230]
• To understand the play sequence fully, one must understand the historical context. By the time MP was written, the Evangelical movement had attacked what they saw as a link between the amorality of the upper classes and the fad for amateur theatricals. [231] "A common and important leading objection is that play-acting tempts girls especially into an unseemly kind of personal display." [231] In MP, Lovers' Vows gives the actors license to behave in ways that would conventionally be thought highly improper. "The imagined free world which comes into being on the stage is...the clearest image in all Jane Austen's novels of what she was opposed to." [233] [There follows a discussion of the "jacobin" ideology embedded in Lovers' Vows.] [pp. 233-236]
• In the second part of the book, Henry Crawford turns his attention to Fanny, who becomes the active heroine and who is required "to make a positive stand: to discern the true nature of evil, to choose the future course of her life, and, through a period of total loneliness, like a true Christian, to endure." [236]
• "[T]he change of theme calls for a wholly new linguistic strategy. Henceforward, Fanny's free indirect speech becomes the vehicle of the narrative, and the special quality of her mind colours, or dominates, the story. There is far less dialogue...." [237]
• There follows a discussion of (1) the qualities of "tranquility" and "quiet," associated with Fanny and the religious side of her nature, and "bustle" and "noise," associated with the Crawfords, Mrs. Norris, and the Price household [237-42], and (2) the influence of Evangelicalism on the story [242-44].
• "Ideologically, the coherence of the novel depends on the reader's being able to make the connection Fanny makes, the subtle association between Portsmouth and London. In both towns, people's lives are dominated by one form or other of materialism. Petty details of life obscure the eternal verities. Worst of all, perhaps, there can be no love, no 'natural' family feeling" in a setting where everyone is "at war with the interests of others." [244]
• Butler feels with others that "Fanny is a failure....Mansfield Park is at its best when her part is smallest, in the first volume." [248] The problem is fundamental: the use of heroine-centered writing to make an anti-jacobin case that is "skeptical of self and refers beyond self to objective values." [247] Nevertheless, Butler praises "the technical triumph of the first volume, a skillful dramatization of the conservative case and one of the most intelligent pieces of writing in all English fiction." [249]

Chapter 11 (Emma)

• Emma presents the familiar plot of the conservative novel: a young woman at the threshold of life who must survey society, distinguish true values from false, and discipline what is selfish, immature or fallible in her character. Unlike Manfield Park, with its exemplary heroine, Emma presents the story almost entirely through the consciousness of its heroine, who is unreliable. [250] Emma is also unusual in that its heroine is socially preeminent: "Every other Austen leading lady is socially neglected or discounted: even the confident and energetic Elizabeth is denied a positive, managerial role in events." [251] Austen's purpose in this is to give her heroine complete freedom to make mistakes for which she must take full moral responsibility. [251]

• Emma is personally uninterested in marriage because it would mean submitting to continued moral assessment by another. [251-52]

• In the second part of the novel, it is Emma's duty to assess two strangers, Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. [252] Emma fails at both. "From the beginning there is perversity and injustice in the manner in which Emma meets the challenge of Frank and Jane. Because Emma fears critical, rational friendship, she tries to avoid evidence that will be in Jane's favour, and substitutes instead her own more hostile fantasies...." [254] "Frank Churchill . . . is treated from the beginning by Emma with wilful indulgence." [255] Emma understands that Frank is morally suspect but brushes aside the evidence she observes. [255] She cooperates in some of Frank's worst behavior, flirting with him in front of the other characters (especially his secret fiancée Jane) when she has decided that she doesn't care for him and would reject a proposal. [257]

• In the aftermath of Box Hill, "Emma's discovery that Frank and Jane are engaged, and that she loves Mr. Knightley brings her back to the directness and truth she is capable of when her judgment is clear" [257] and instills in her a new humility and willingness to criticize herself. [258] "Such a recognition implies...the rejection, in fact, of subjective mental processes in favor of objective; rejection of individual 'lights' in favor of the more reliable guides of external evidence and impartial reasoning." [258]

• All of Austen's characters are fallible, even Knightley. "Instead of investing one character throughout with right opinions, as the lesser anti-jacobins do, Jane Austen depicts even the best minds as continually fallible, under the pressure of new evidence, and potentially undermined from within by selfishness." [260] [Ex: Knightly admits that because he was jealous of Frank Churchill, Knightly was prejudiced against him.] "...The continuous effort necessary in her moral world is one of the few points at which she seems almost Godwinian." [260]

• While the narrator does not often intrude into the narrative, Austen's language is a sign of moral standing. Robert Martin's language is "manly and direct," while Mr. Elton's is "over-elaborate, devious and unreliable." [265]

• As in other novels, Austen presents two "alternate" heroines, Harriet and Jane, with whom Emma may be compared. [267]

• Harriet is innocent and instinctively good, but simple-minded and ignorant. "The comparison between Emma and Harriet resembles the kind of anti-Rousseauistic point made by Maria Edgeworth in Belinda, when she compares her intelligent heroine with the simple Virginia." Both Austen and Edgeworth are firmly on the side of "art" against "nature." [267]

• Jane Fairfax is the opposite of Harriet but also unlike Emma in her reserve. Jane's fault is her desire to "live within the self", her preference not to be outgoing and direct with others. [268] Butler comments that while Austen presents Jane sympathetically, she "is almost as much an anti-heroine as Mary Crawford." [269]

• Mr. Knightley is firmly grounded in the social world of Highbury. He is active in the community and the church and attends every social gathering. By comparison, Emma's family does not own much land, Emma is not active in the community and her "conception of herself as first lady is a kind of figment of the mind." [273] Her social position is fragile: because she is unmarried, Mrs. Elton will take social precedence over Emma. In marrying Mr. Knightly, Emma's social position will be secured and she will become actively involved in the community with her husband. [273]

• In Emma, Austen's "technical triumph is to employ the character-centered format, to place the action almost wholly within the heroine's consciousness, [and] to enlist . . the reader's sympathy", [274] and at the same time to demonstrate the dangers of reliance on a subjective viewpoint unmediated by reference to objective evidence and reason. [274]

Chapter 12 (Persuasion and Sanditon)

• Persuasion rings the changes on the familiar conservative theme, except that in this case it's Captain Wentworth who goes through the process of error, recognition of error, and remorse and determination to do better in the future. From his first appearance, Wentworth is highly self-assured, "his personal philosophy approaches revolutionary optimism and individualism and he is impatient of, or barely recognizes, those claims of a mentor which for him can be dismissed in the single word 'persuasion'." [275] Later, after the incident with Louisa at Lyme, he recognizes Louisa's extreme self-will and Anne's strength. [276] "In the image characteristic of Jane Austen's faulty heroines—that of blindness upon which light suddenly breaks—he says of his own errors, "I shut my eyes, and would not understand you, or do you justice." [276]

• However, Anne Elliott and not Captain Wentworth is at the center of the novel. The reader sees "her selective view of external 'reality,' her overwhelming emotional sense of a climax that is also anti-climax....the intimacy with which Jane Austen approaches Anne's consciousness appears to be something extraordinary." [277] This focus on Anne's inner life comes close to contradicting Austen's general thesis in her other novels (the unreliability of one's consciousness and the need to test it against objective facts and reason) by suggesting that "the senses have a decisive advantage over reason and fact." [277] "...Anne's inner life has an unassailable quality and truth." [278]

• Butler identifies several authorial failures in Persuasion. In addition to shifting back and forth between objective presentation of facts and Anne's consciousness, Butler feels that the portrayal of Anne's cousin, William Walter Elliott, is a failure. Austen's description of him is incomplete and unpersuasive and although he is intended to be the tempter-figure, Anne is never remotely tempted by him. Here, the villain is not villainous enough. [pp. 279-281]

• In Persuasion, "...the author's severe handling of the baronet [Anne's father] comes as near to social criticism as anything she ever wrote." [284] This criticism expresses "a typical conservative middle-class ethic of the day", [285] tinged with the influence of Evangelicalism and Unitarianism. [285]

• What we can see of Sanditon expresses familiar JA themes: the perversion of an older, organic rural community through its conversion into a fashionable resort at which congregate the kind of materialistic, self-centered, irresponsible members of the gentry and aristocracy typical of "town." [287] Her literary techniques have evolved—there is a continuation of her experiment with subjective writing, and a new interest in the details of place and in visual images—but her basic stance has not. [287-88]

Chapter 13 (Conclusion)

• We must abandon the idea that Jane Austen was not involved in the events and issues of her day. "The crucial action of her novels is in itself expressive of the conservative side in an active war of ideas. So, too, is the stylized opposition in her fictional world between certain kinds of virtuous characters, and certain kinds of villains." [294]

• Jane Austen is not primarily a "naturalist" [realist] writer. She is capable of great objectivity in her writing, but it is in the service of a campaign against subjectivity. [294] Her portrayal of the psychology of her heroines is limited. "The rational mind and the conscience are given an ascendancy over irrational kinds of experience that no more seemed true to life in Jane Austen's day than it does now. Here, especially, she is a polemicist offering an ideal program, and not a realist....She chooses to omit the sensuous, the irrational, the involuntary types of mental experience because, although she cannot deny their existence, she disapproves of them." [295]

• Austen is a moralist if that means that her moral characters wage war with her "natural" characters. "Her skepticism about fallen human nature has excellent Christian authority. She is indeed a moralist much as Samuel Johnson is a moralist." [296]

Devlin

Devlin—Jane Austen and Education

Chapter 1: The Background (1)

• This chapter is primarily about the similarities and differences between education as it appears in Austen's novels and John Locke's theory of education in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, the most influential pedagogical treatise in eighteenth-century Britain. Most of the comparisons result in similarities. The book has a lot of specific examples from each novel.

• "All Jane Austen's novels, and many of her minor works, unfinished pieces and juvenilia, are about education. It is the imprudencies and education of her heroines that chiefly interest us . . . Education, for the heroines, is a process through which they come to see clearly themselves and their conduct, and by this new vision of insight become better people." (1)

• "The importance of seeing clearly (even the very phrase) recurs repeatedly in Jane Austen's novels. Seeing clearly is . . . both seeing one's self clearly (self-knowledge) and seeing other people and the external world as existing in their own right and independently of self." (2)
• It is the moments of self-realization that are the most dramatic and most memorable from the books, not the happy endings. EX: Elizabeth in P&P (3) and Emma in E (4)

• "For Aristotle, as for Locke and Jane Austen, virtue must be learnt in childhood from a moral tutor." (14)

• The relation of Jane Austen's individual talent to the tradition of the eighteenth-century novel is seldom more clearly seen than in her handling of the mentor figure. He is brought into the centre of the book, becomes in fact the hero. And if he succeeds (as he does) in educating the heroine, that (as we shall see) is not because of what he says, but because of what he is and because of his relationship with her." (16)
• "A happy marriage in Jane Austen's novels guarantees the continuing education of both partners." (20)

Chapter 2: The Fiction This chapter is a review of Austen's early works through the lens of the above chapter's claims.

• "This moral imagination, or power of imaginative sympathy, is something which the heroines of Jane Austen must acquire; to have it is to see clearly, and without it no education is possible." (30)
• In each case the heroine learns the truth about the young man and is saved from the possibility of unhappiness. But in each case she is saved not because she learns the truth, but because of the steadying power, the sharpening of perception which love for someone else gives her, and the standard of comparison which this other man (the hero) provides." (33) EX: Elizabeth, Wickham, Darcy; Emma, Frank, Knightley
• Catherine Morland "has a great deal to learn. She must reject fiction for fact and invention for reflection; and it is her affectionate heart, her capacity to love, which will make it possible for her to do this. Without this ability to love it seems that no moral growth is possible. General Tilney (like Sir Walter Elliot) cannot love, and remains blind to moral worth" (43)

Chapter 3: The Background (2) This chapter argues that Austen was not endorsing Shaftesburian moral philosophy - she does not show natural affection or benevolence as a real force. They must be acquired (59-60). In Austen's novels, it is attention to others and to the natural world that brings self-discovery and self-fulfillment (63). In Austen novels, the beautiful and the good are not necessarily connected, as in Shaftesbury, nor are the happy and the good (64-66). Unlike Shaftesbury, who believes in an innate moral sense, Austen continually writes about the education of her characters - their morals improve (68). Austen's morality is more akin to that of Johnson and Butler, who believed in a complex moral conscience shaped by experience and which utilized reason and feeling.

• Books we know Austen read: Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Chesterfield's Letters to his Son; works by Samuel Johnson; Blair's Rhetoric; Thomas Sherlock's sermons (49)
• Unlike Johnson, Austen seems to have believed that fiction that wanted to instill virtue should be written with "grey" or morally ambiguous characters; Johnson believed that only black-and-white characters could instill virtue in readers (55).

Chapter 4: Mansfield Park

This chapter is a detailed reading of MP that would be more useful for the MP article.

Doody (JA's Reading)

Doody ― "Jane Austen's Reading"

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• We can know what Jane Austen read only if specific works are mentioned in her letters or through allusions and references in her own works. p. 347

Austen's knowledge of the literature of judgment and opinion

• In Jane Austen's time, the phrase "serious reading" meant specifically religious and devotional literature. By far the most important "serious" works to Austen were the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. Even if Austen had not read the Bible privately, she heard it read aloud every week all her life as a part of the Anglican liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer is even more important in Anglican life [true]. The prayers Austen composed echo the language and cadences of TBCP. Doody believes that TBCP is a good influence on style, in part because its language is intended to be read. Doody believes that TBCP rather than the work of Samuel Johnson is the source of Austen's "balanced and coordinated sentences," most in evidence in Mansfield Park. p. 347-348. However, while Austen's style was heavily influenced by these works, she seems to have decided not to refer in her work directly to the Bible or other sacred works. "She is singular among novelists of her age in her refusal to admit references to the Bible, or to biblical characters, scenes or stories." p. 348.

• In her novels, Austen mentions collections of sermons and essays, but makes clear that reading them is not likely to improve a character already inclined to be bad. The Crawfords in MP are readers of sermons, in Catherine or the Bower Catherine's aunt gives her Blair's Sermons to read and is not happy with the result, and in Sanditon Sir Edward Denham is described as a reader of "all the Essays, Letters, Tours & Criticisms of the day." "It would seem that a good heart may indeed make good use of literature, but good books of any kind cannot give wisdom to a fool or create a right heart in a perverse reader." p. 349.

• Austen seems to have enjoyed a number of moral essays and periodical pieces. She genuinely appreciated Samuel Johnson's works and also knew the Letters, Boswell's Life of Johnson and Tour to the Hebrides. She deprecated Addison and the Spectator, savaging them in NA. pp. 349-350.

• History was a school subject, taught by means of Goldsmith's History of England, and Austen and her sister made clear what they thought of that work in their parody "History of England" found among the Juvenilia. Beyond this, Austen seems to have been interested in works of history for entertainment and from an interest in social history. She was familiar with Horace Walpole's iconoclastic work on Richard III (reflected in the favorable treatment of that monarch in the parody "History" and on the first page of NA). Her letters disclose that she read at least parts of Henry's History of England notwithstanding its overall dullness and partisan nature. pp. 350-352.

• Travel writing interested Austen. The letters show that she read Mackenzie's Travels in Iceland and Lord McCartney's memoir of his embassy to China. Her interest in Gilpin's various works on the picturesque is well-known. She also apparently enjoyed Letters from England, supposedly written by a Spanish traveler in England but in fact published under a pseudonym by Robert Southey. pp. 352-353.

• Austen responded very favorably to one work on current affairs, Captain Charles William Pasley's Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1810). This was an attack, from a conservative viewpoint, on Britain's foreign policy at the time of Napoleon's greatest successes. Pasley believed strongly that English foreign and military policy conditioned the British army to lose battles on land. In a letter to Cassandra, Austen wrote:

We quite run over with books....I am reading...an Essay on the Military Police [sic] & Institutions of the British Empire, by Capt. Pasley of the Engineers, a book which I protested against at first, but which upon trial I find delightfully written & highly entertaining. I am as much in love with the Author as I ever was with Clarkson or Buchanan....The first soldier I ever sighed for; but he does write with extraordinary force & spirit. (Letter of January 24, 1813. Le Faye, Jane Austen's Letters, 198.)

Doody cites Pasley's "strong command of the common phrase: 'it is no economy, either of money or of lives, to make war by driblets.'" pp. 353-355.

• "Jane Austen is, almost disconcertingly, very much a Modern." p. 355. She exhibited no real interest in classical antiquity or literature. There is no indication that she was interested in authors (e.g., Pope) whose names are synonymous with the classics. In her works there are two Latin phrases, one classical allusion, but no other references to any classical myth, story or character. "There is no other novelist, male or female, of her time of whom this is true. Other women writers as various as Burney and Edgeworth, West and Wollstonecraft, exhibit a respect for the ancient public tradition of letters—a respect apparently absent in Austen." p. 355.

Austen's knowledge of literature produced to delight rather than to instruct

• Shakespeare is the one great English classic Austen freely admits into her pattern of references. She was exposed to Shakespeare and other "modern" dramatists through family reading and theatricals. These included Sheridan's comedies and plays by Centlivre, Beaumont and Fletcher, Garrick, and Fielding. There is no indication of any interest in other Jacobean or in Restoration playwrights. p. 356.

• While Austen knew Shakespeare's poetry, there is no indication that she read other 16th or 17th century poets. She was familiar with Pope but apparently not with Dryden. She was well-read in contemporary poetry, including Scott, Byron, Burns, Crabbe, Southey, and Cowper. Her views, if any, on Coleridge and Wordsworth are not known. Nor are there indications of any interest in foreign poets. Austen could read French but doesn't mention any French poets in her letters. pp. 356-357.

• Austen, like the rest of her family, was a great novel reader. Her letters contain many allusions to contemporary fiction, often to such small details as to show that she was thoroughly familiar with, and retained, what she read. Austen read and reread novels, even minor ones. "It is to novel reading that Austen brings her energies, her discrimination, her really serious judgment." (p. 358.) She read widely within the genre, including many works considered mediocre both then and now, but tended to emphasize domestic fiction by women writers. All of her work from the Juvenilia onward reflects an intense study and absorption of contemporary fiction and a kind of dialog with it. All of her work contains both explicit and well-hidden references to work she had read. The more novels of the eighteenth century one reads, the more visible is Austen's complex relationships to them. Examples: references to Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison abound in her work, beginning with "Jack and Alice" in the Juvenilia. The title of Pride and Prejudice comes directly from Burney's Cecilia. Wickham's story in P & P is a kind of parody of Tom Jones, with old Mr. Darcy in the role of Squire Allworthy, Darcy as Blifil, and Wickham as Tom Jones. pp. 358-362.

Doody (JA's Juvenilia)

Doody ― "Jane Austen, that disconcerting child", in Alexander and McMaster, The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf

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• We normally think of the juvenile writings of children who later became famous authors as foreshadowing later accomplishments - "a foretaste of things to come." (101 Doody suggests that "[s]ometimes the early works may point to talents not fully expressed in the main oeuvre, or at least to roads not taken." (101) That may create cognitive difficulties, however, because in such cases the child writer ceases to be inferior to the adult. (101)

• Austen the child writer is not "child-like" except perhaps in The History of England. Instead, she is "attractive and sprightly" as a writer but also "ironic and artful". (101) This creates unease in the reader. Doody cites the "Rice Portrait" (in the authenticity of which she evidently believes) and the controversy it provokes: the controversy "would seem to have been aroused at least in part because the young Jane Austen in this portrait—cool and nubile—is not our dear 'Aunt Jane'. This is a young girl of the new revolutionary decade of the 1790s. She takes care of no one and nothing...but walks freely towards life, with open eyes and curious amused gaze. There is nothing soft, auntly, or fubsy about her" (101)

• Doody feels that the term "Juvenilia" applied to Austen's early work is condescending, indicating work that is at least "third rate" (after major works [novels] and minor works [poems and letters]), to which attention need not be paid. 103.

Austen's works of the 1790s, however, seem not readily classifiable, and not 'juvenile'. The stories are very polished, disconcertingly sophisticated. Arguably, they exhibit different capacities at work than those evident in her six complete novels. Their comedy is more offbeat, more raucous [that word again - Simmaren], sharper; looking at these stories we can see that in the novels Austen had to bend to the way of things, and to placate editorial tastes in producing 'serious' courtship novels in which female characters learn from experience how to be better. 103. [Simmaren comment: there is an anachronism here. Austen did not have to deal with editors as a modern novelist does. Like modern authors, she had to judge what the reading/buying public wanted, i.e., what would sell, but without the help of professional editors, and she had to convince hard-bitten printer/publishers that what she wrote was likely to sell. The fact that all but one of her novels were (in modern terms) self-published ("at the author's own risk") suggests the (in the event justified) high degree of her self-confidence but also tells us that the institutional barriers to publication for Austen were not that high, since her own money and not a publisher's was at risk. This is Doody's principal thesis and [who am I?] I'm arguing with it, in part: not "editorial tastes" but public tastes. Note, however, the quotation four paragraphs down, in which "market forces" and changes in culture are credited with Austen's change in approach. Perhaps the statement I'm complaining about here simply reflects sloppy writing/editing.]

A closer look at the early works suggests that there is another Austen, "a comic writer of harder tone and more fearless satire," (103) who was required to hide her Rabelasian qualities in order to find a market for her work. (103) "The early works point in directions in which their author was later not permitted to go." (103)

• Doody discusses what is known and what can reasonably be inferred about the three "notebooks" containing the Juvenilia and the works within them. She is confident that the work in the notebooks represents reproductions (with some edits) of work originally drafted elsewhere. She concludes that the bulk of the work in Volume the First was written in the later 1780s, so that the earlier stories were likely written by Austen between the age of twelve and seventeen, with a peak of productivity around age 15 (1790). The writing of the later of the Juvenilia overlaps with the period (1790-1795) in which Austen produced the first drafts of her three early novels: "Elinor and Marianne," "First Impressions" and "Susan." 103-104. On the meta level, the existence of the notebooks is (Doody believes) convincing evidence that "from her early teens Austen thought of herself as an author, potentially a published one." (104)

• [Simmaren comment: this article is poorly proofed. It says that Austen's father offered "Susan" to Richard Crosby in 1803 when the other biographical sources are clear that Henry Austen did so (in lieu of George Austen) through a friend who knew Crosby. It also says that Austen repurchased the copyright six years later (1809) rather than thirteen years later (1816). This does not inspire confidence.]

• According to Doody, after the move to Chawton, Austen "had to swallow the hard fact that her own kind of fiction, on which she had worked so ardently earlier, would not find a market....The mature Austen growing into her thirties knuckles down, writes courtship novels, and tones down the savage knowing comedy of her early work. She also has to acknowledge changes in the culture, a move away from all the experimentation and boldness of the 1790s. She must make her stories into love stories of good people, not only holding her satire in check but turning her back on a brilliant analytical and surprising comedy that she had invented earlier. The 'Juvenilia' are a source of excellencies and revelations that we do not find so unmixedly elsewhere in Austen's works. They belong not only to her youthful life but to a revolutionary decade." 105. [Simmaren comment: this is more convincing, but it depends on some assumptions about the original form/content of the three early novels, for which there is no hard evidence.]

• In writing the stories in the Juvenilia, Austen needed only to please her family and herself. She was "free of worries about editors [cf] and even — to a surprising extent — free of fears about what young ladies ought to produce." 105. Her stories reveal a child "who is already astonishingly sophisticated about sexual relations and social mores." (106) While in this Austen was influenced by the eighteenth-century novel, her direct experience was more important. Doody infers from the content of the early work that Austen had been exposed from an early age to people who were much richer than her own family and who possessed a broader (if more superficial) knowledge of the world, perhaps rich Jamaican planters. [Simmaren comment [WP:OR warning]: as a farmer's daughter, the facts of sexual reproduction cannot have been a mystery to her.] Austen's early life also taught her about inequality through her brother Edward's good fortune. 105-107. "Life itself...has the random heartless quality that novelists try to tame with their own forms of moralism. The Novel, by now a traditional genre, offers a rationale, a way of making life and love look reasonable, when Austen already sees that they are not." (107) Austen's short early works "are novels–or mock novels–in miniature" (107) which almost uniformly mock the conventions of the conventional novel. 107.

• Frederic and Elfrida opens with intimations of incest, a forbidden love that cannot be acknowledged, beginning but moving quickly beyond the old narrative trope of the look-alike pair of opposite sexes. While the narrator says that they are separated by the rules of propriety, Elfrida violates one of the most important of these rules by proposing marriage directly to Frederic, who rejects her advance, offended at her violation of the rule that a woman must hide her interest in a man "until the man has himself made a formal move in her direction." (108) Elfrida turns to the conventionally feminine romantic response, swoons, and Frederic changes his mind, permitting the two to wed in violation of the rules of propriety. 107-108. "The parodic story itself moves in a skilled succession, though it also achieves the effects of abruptness, fast cuts (in the filmic sense) and bold juxtapositions. It is not just a parody, but an exploration of narrative elements." (108)

• Jack and Alice is a lively and amused critique of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison. Her hero, Charles Adams, is described in such superlative terms that no one can measure up to his own ruthlessly egotistical standards. "Gazing in the mental mirror in an ecstacy of self-regard is the common occupation of most of the characters, and their friendships or love affairs are but slight projections of the irresistible activity....Egotism, Austen observes, is the normal and natural mode of Enlightenment thought and expression." 108-109. Austen also borrows plot elements and incidents from Charlotte Smith's Emmeline, particularly the "problem" of a young woman caught between two attachments and the story of Lady Williams and Miss Johnson walking in the Citron Grove. 109-111. Austen rejects the efforts of other novelists to turn her readers away from that which is worse to something better—in her early stories, Austen seems to say that there is no "better". (111) Her early works are in no sense "realistic". They include many descriptive details but are not bound either by the conventions of the novel or any sense of the probable. 112.

• "As a teenager [Austen] was already an expert in English fiction" and its conventions. (112) In her early works, Austen takes apart the constituent elements of contemporary fiction and reassembles them in unconventional ways that suit her. "These early pieces are not failures at writing 'real', nor are they exercises in mere whimsy. They are the works of a powerful and witty mind scarcely at all committed to conventional patterns. Her fables are non-realistic fables of desire, mocking the very formulations of both rational non-fiction and fiction in all their reassuring stagecraft, stage lighting, and arrangements of tinsel and candles." 112.

• Austen's characters in the Juvenilia represent not some adolescent ideal but "an orgy of narcissism wittily observed by their author". 112. "[T]hey inhabit a world of child-like ego, of greed without boundaries", (112) and try to take what they can of sex, money and power. "Austen persuades us, however, that this is psychologically and economically the real world of England in the 1790s...." 112. "The anti-heroines and anti-heros of these early works can never even remotely entertain any reason why their own self-interest should not trump all other interests." 113. The protagonist of Evelyn, Mr. Gower, enjoys the hospitality of the villagers without compunction and prospers in the end from their insane benevolence. (113) So also in Love and Freindship, in which the two heroines feel free to steal from their benefactor, Mr. Macdonald, and become annoyed when he objects. 114-115.

• Almost all of Austen's characters in the Juvenilia enjoy unorthodox sex lives. Legal (as opposed to sham or spurious) marriages are rare and easily ended, and adultery and fornication common, regarded as "merely charming means to new desirable ends". (115) In Lesley Castle, the protagonist, Charlotte, finds a captivating substitute for marriage (and sex) in cooking and eating. 115-116.

• "All these extraordinary twists upon the conventions of both morality and the courtship novel seem a way of announcing not only a resistance to the courtship morality preached by the novels but even a decided refusal to accept the kind of morality usually presented in novels, both of the liberal and conservative schools. The youthful Austen apparently suspected the moral-social traps that lie within novels, both major and minor, as they preach social and moral doctrines, hoping to remold contemporaries (more particularly women) into better behavior, and to lead them to a dutiful and fulfilling marriage, while showing that immoral and selfish views and actions lead only to gloom and repentance. Austen implicitly denies the truth of such a vision. Yet she always gives credit to the novel as a genre for even raising such questions. Of all the works of fact and fiction it is novels that acknowledge that these matters — sex, marriage, money, the self — are deeply problematic." 117.

• While some other contemporary authors were trying to portray female friendship positively, Austen (in the Juvenilia) refused to do so. In her early work, friendship between women is simply a tactic. Egotists search for mirror-images of themselves that can echo their own sentiment. Doody notes that compared with other female novelists, Austen's mature work "is very negative about female friends" (118) — Emma and Jane Fairfax, Emma and Harriet Smith, Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe. Aside from sisters, there are no good female friends. 117-118.

• Doody believes, on the evidence of the Juvenilia, that Jane Austen could have become a very different writer if she had not had to bend to the dictates of the market in order to be published. Her work could have resembled the work of Rabelais, Cervantes or Dickens. Her earlier observations and preferences can be seen in the mature novels in the fact that villainy is seldom seriously punished. (118-119) In her novels, Austen "remains true to her primary observation, that Fortune favours the bold and the heartless, and the honest and generous will never be able to keep up in terms of worldly favour." (118)

Duckworth

Duckworth―The Improvement of the Estate

Introduction (Some Social and Critical Contexts)

• Many of Jane Austen's novels (Sense and Sensibility is discussed) portray a contrast between "the sense of security that is the birthright of the self" and the possibility (and fear) of "degradation." The danger facing many of Austen's heroines is that a secure existence may be transformed without warning into social isolation and relative or actual penury. [pp. 2-3] The feared losses are not simply economic, however. An individual who loses her stable and inherited "estate...more importantly, [is] excluded from [her] 'grounds' of being and action .... [and] may feel at a loss how to act." [pp. 4-5]
• Duckworth places himself in opposition to the line of "subversive" critics that began with Reginald Ferrars and continued with D. W. Harding, Marvin Mudrick and their successors, who argue that "Jane Austen undermines the social values she seems to affirm, that she can discover personal equilibrium in a society she detests only through the secret ironies of her art...." Duckworth argues that (1) in the face of the danger of "degradation," Austen's heroines react positively "to support and maintain an inherited structure of values and behavior", displaying tacitly (or in the case of Fanny Price more or less explicitly) a sort of Christian stoicism, (2) Austen portrays the dangers as well as the value of individualism, and (3) Austen's heroines emerge from isolation and despair to be reinstated into society. [pp. 5-9]
• Duckworth believes that this recurrent theme derives from the context of the eighteenth century English novel. "If her fiction looks forward to modern themes and responses..., it also grows out of an eighteenth century novelistic concern with the predicament of the dislocated individual. It is in the eighteenth century novel that the recurring pattern of Jane Austen's plots―the movement from a condition of initial security to a period of isolation and then a final reinstatement in society―finds its origins." [p. 10] He includes a long discussion of such novels, emphasizing particularly Richardson's Clarissa. [pp. 10-23]
• Eighteenth century English novels "generally testify to a world that is divinely structured." Nineteenth century novels evidence a loss of faith in a divine basis for society or individual existence and "dramatize a situation in which the self is discovered as the only determinant of order and value." Jane Austen's novels are intermediate between these two poles. [pp. 23-25] Austen's heroines exhibit a belief in the prior existence of two imperatives for individual action: morality based in religious principle and duties to society. Austen's novels portray "society" positively, and her novels end with hero and heroine united in the company of true friends, society "reaffirmed around the central union, and the social fragmentation that initially threatened ... reconstituted through individual commitment into a new whole." [pp. 26-27] "Jane Austen affirms society, ideally considered as a structure of values that are ultimately founded in religious principle, at the same time as she distinguished it from its frequently corrupted form." [p. 28]
• Of course, Austen was well aware of the economic factors in her society, of the dislocations caused by economic and industrial development, and of the confrontation between traditional and economic values. In her fiction, she consistently resists the pressures of this development on traditional morality rooted in religious values. "It is a consistent mark of moral integrity in her novels that solely financial considerations be excluded from personal decisions....Frequently, "economic" words are employed intentionally to assert that possession of money entails a commensurate moral responsibility." [pp. 29-30]
• Mansfield Park is the novel that most clearly expresses "Jane Austen's serious concern over the state and continuity of the social structure...." and is therefore a principal focus of Duckworth's book. MP is not (and Austen's other novels are not) simply a reactionary defense of the status quo. Instead, it is concerned with "the improvement of the estate," that is, with proper and improper responses to an inherited culture. "The 'estate' in Mansfield Park is symbolic of a whole social and moral inheritance...." [pp. 31]
• Austen permits her heroines some "individualism" but "limits the individualism of her heroines from a recognition of the possible destructive effects of individual freedom....Her novels may be seen as the continuing record of a responsible woman concerned with right conduct in 'such days as these.'" [p. 32]
• Duckworth makes an interesting analogy between the dangers of individualism portrayed in Austen's novels and the limits Austen placed upon herself as a novelist through her efforts (using almanacs and "road books," making inquiry of her correspondents) to describe accurately the chronology and geography of the world she creates. Austen "is as aware of the dangers of unlimited imaginative freedom in authors as in heroines." She displays "a concern that the novelist should describe things that are really there, that imagination should be limited to an existing order." [pp. 32-33]

Chapter 1 (Mansfield Park: Jane Austen's Grounds of Being)

• One thread of hostile critical attention to Mansfield Park is exemplified by Reginald Ferrers, who wrote (in 1917) that "alone of her books, Mansfield Park is vitiated by a radical dishonesty." Ferrars views Fanny Price as a "prig-pharisee" and says that in Austen's characterization of FP "the 'official' censor intervenes on behalf of society to suppress insurgent individualism." (p. 36) Duckworth agrees that MP is an artistic failure but denies that it is morally dishonest; to say so is to "misunderstand Jane Austen's fundamental intuitions about individual character and society and to fail to realize that her moral fervor in this novel is called forth (and largely justified) by the seriousness of her fictional issues." (p. 37)

• As in her other novels, Austen is concerned with the proper relation between society and the individual. Unlike her other novels, individualism in MP is represented by characters (the Crawfords, Rushworth, the Bertram daughters) who are morally suspect, while those who should be upholders of society (Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, Mrs. Norris, Edmund Bertram) are without exception deficient. The plot of MP demonstrates an increasing moral confusion on the part of all of the characters except (crucially) Fanny. (pp. 37-38)

• "Throughout Jane Austen's fiction, estates function not only as the settings of action but as indexes to the character and social responsibility of their owners." [gives examples from P & P, Emma and Persuasion] (p. 38-39) Landscape improvements also appear as an issue in all of the novels, but in MP they become a recurring motif and "suggest an attitude to the process of social change that is central to all her fiction." (p. 39) Duckworth moves to a discussion of the noted landscape designer Humphrey Repton, and observes that "she [Austen] is less occupied with the aesthetic merits of different styles of landscape than with the negative social implications of a particular mode of 'improvement.'" (p. 41-42) "Reptonian" improvements, especially in the less capable hands of his followers, tended to be radical, to be non-contextual, to cut the "improved" estate off from its surrounding community, and, of course to be extravagant and wasteful. (pp. 40-46)

• Duckworth draws a parallel between this debate over the merits of "improvements" and contemporary political debates. Edmund Burke was not an enemy of change and improvement per se (he warns against the dangers of ossification of social and political institutions) but argued strongly that change should be limited to that which was necessary. Burke's vocabulary distinguished between "improvement" ("treat[ing] the deficient or corrupt parts of an established order with the character of the whole in mind") and "innovation" or "alteration" ("to destroy all that had been built up by the 'collected reason of the ages'"). In Burke's view, this was the fundamental difference between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution. In making his points, Burke often draws upon the metaphor of the improvement of estates. (pp. 45-47 - quotes are Duckworth's paraphrases, not Burke's language)

• Duckworth discusses the two principal episodes in MP in which the theme of improvements is central: the visit to Mr. Rushworth's estate Southerton Court, made expressly for the purpose of considering the possibilities of improvements, and Henry Crawford's proposals for the improvement of the parsonage at Thornton Lacey. (pp. 48-54) Duckworth also views the episode of the attempted theatrical at the Mansfield Park house as another illustration of this theme. In undertaking the play, the participants throw off ordinary social constraints and feel free to behave in ways normally considered improper. They also feel free to alter the disposition of furniture and even the fabric of the house itself. This confusion signifies the moral confusion of the participants and the confusion their behavior has introduced into an ordered social structure. Upon his return from Antigua, Sit Thomas (for once) acts as a proper head of family should, shutting down the play and returning the house and estate to their normal condition. (pp. 55-58)

• Austen's point here is that "the estate as a structure in time is valid only as it is actively supported by the individual." Estates must be both preserved and improved when necessary, but in making improvements the individual must respect the character of the whole while repairing particular deficiencies. (pp. 58-59)

• Duckworth believes that Edmund Bertram's commitment to the Anglican priesthood is real and sincere - otherwise, his decisions to act in the play and to court May Crawford would not seem like such contradictions of his chosen vocation. In the chapel at Southerton, Edmund articulates Austen's view of the ideally constituted society, "in which the primary social gestures (manners) incorporate moral intentions, which are themselves founded in religious principles." (pp. 61-62)

• The contrast between Henry Crawford and Fanny Price is central to Mansfield Park. Crawford is a brilliant actor, advocates enthusiastically the kind of "improvement" to estates that would have offended Burke, and views his "estate" (both his property and his presentation of self) as manipulable. Fanny refuses to participate in the play, consistently opposes Crawford's style of improvements, and believes in a permanent sense of place and a stable idea of personal identity. (pp. 64-70)

• The paradox of Mansfield Park is that the failures of those charged with preservation of the estate (the Bertrams) endanger it and it is preserved by someone (Fanny) who is for most of the story an outsider. "Only Fanny possesses the instinctive 'sense of duty' necessary for the continuance of the traditional culture of Mansfield." Fanny's instinctive morality is attributable to a proper early education, provided largely by Edmund. This is contrasted with the immorality of the Bertram sisters and (to a lesser extent) their older brother, which is due to Sir Thomas' failures to educate his children properly. There is a structural irony here: as the story progresses, Fanny moves closer to the center of the house, her inward journey an outward and visible symbol of her increasing (and increasingly visible) inner worth. (pp. 71-80)

Chapter 2 (Aspects of Northanger Abbey and Sense & Sensibility)

• These two novels are "earlier" works, written in somewhat different literary contexts from the later novels, but they exhibit the same underlying social and ethical assumptions as Austen's mature work. "Society remains in these novels the necessary context of individual action." (p. 82)

• The larger societies portrayed—Bath and London—are vulgar, hostile and corrupt environments. "Jane Austen is deeply aware of a threatened change from a stable society based on Christian principles to a society in which money, or the appearance of money, is all that counts....these novels suggest through the controlling presence of an affirmative narrative voice and the developing careers of their heroines, acceptable social alternatives to the largely corrupt worlds described." (pp. 82-83)

• Duckworth states that Sense and Sensibility, while a parody of the novel of sentiment, contains a surprising amount of direct social observation. Austen provided financial and economic specifics throughout her work, evidence of an awareness of an economically fluid contemporary society. Duckworth provides considerable information concerning the meanings of various income and wealth levels in English society of this period. (cf. Edward Copeland. "Money," Jane Austen in Context, pp. 317-326) (pp. 85-86)

• Jane Austen fears that economic considerations will overcome moral considerations in human conduct. "Throughout her fiction the most amoral characters—Wickham, Mary Crawford, Mr. Elliot—are the most economically motivated....it is in Sense and Sensibility that the vicious cancer of economically motivated conduct is most searching analyzed." (p. 88)

• In Northanger Abbey, "Jane Austen provides an early attempt at defining moral behavior in the face of a largely immoral world. In describing Catherine's journey...Jane Austen follows the pattern of the English novel of education in which, from Defoe and Fielding onward, movement through space has accompanied a moral enlightenment on the part of the protagonist." Because in Catherine's case there is little psychological development, the end result is not completely satisfying. (pp. 91-100) Through the book, "[t]he reader comes to perceive the presence of standards of behavior and a fixed point of moral outlook, but he is apt to feel that his arrival at such a perception has left Catherine far behind." (p. 101)

• Duckworth begins by placing Sense and Sensibility in the context of contemporary novels which treated similar themes: Inchbald's Art and Nature (1796), Edgeworth's Letters of Julia and Caroline (1795), and Mme. d'Arblay's Camilla (1796), of which Jane Austen is listed as a subscriber to the original edition.

• Jane Austen intended the reader to view Marianne sympathetically. She is lively, spirited, intelligent, sincere in her enthusiasms, individualistic but not egotistical, and independent-minded. [Duckworth then summarizes the philosophy of sentiment of which Marianne is the inheritor.] "Jane Austen sets herself against these tendencies in Sense and Sensibility, insisting on the necessary aid of judgment in the process of moral decision, and requiring, as she will elsewhere in her fiction, that the individual respect and support her cultural heritage. The major limitations of Marianne's sensibility...are that it places excessive faith in the self's inner ability to reach moral decisions intuitively and rejects entirely the need for living within conventional limits." (pp. 104-107) Marianne responds to her experience of seemingly universal selfishness by retiring into an entirely subjective world in which she can live in accordance with the dictates of her principles of sensibility. Willoughby joins her there at first but is unwilling to live by those principles and abandons Marianne in search of "the main chance." "Her relationship to Willoughby has been for Marianne the constitution of a society of two, and when this is lost through the defection of one of its members, Marianne has no rule for living, no motive for action, no "ground" on which to stand." (pp. 109-109)

• Elinor is a more successful characterization than is usually thought. While her role in the novel is to stand for "sense," because hers is the narrative viewpoint the reader is aware of her strong feelings for Edward, for her sister in her trials, and for the difficulties of their family's semi-dependent situation. "Elinor accepts the validity of social institutions and acts within received principles of ethical and social conduct. Against...the selfish motivations of those around her, Elinor opposes a stoical fidelity to traditional and basically Christian value." (pp. 110-111) "By choosing sense as her point of view over sensibility, Jane Austen has made a statement about the priority of discipline to freedom, and of social principles to individual propensities; but, that statement made, she has also recognized in Elinor's emotion the necessary presence of feeling in the ethical constitution of the individual, if rationality is not to become cold and inhuman." (p. 113)

Chapter 3 (Pride & Prejudice: The Reconstitution of Society)

• As with S & S, "Pride and Prejudice moves from an initial condition of potential social fragmentation to a resolution in which the grounds of society are reconstituted as the principal characters come together in marriage." As before, Austen observes the widespread economic motivation in human conduct, but introduces a new theme, that of the existence of separations, between classes (e.g., Darcy and the Gardiners) and between minds (e.g., Mr. and Mrs. Bennet). (p. 116) The crucial question underlying this novel: in light of these separations, how are people to come together? The answer lies in the education of both hero (Darcy) and heroine (Elizabeth Bennet), who must learn to value each other's separate outlooks and social positions and make the necessary concessions. (p. 117)

• In her individualism, her independence of mind, her strong personal morality, Elizabeth is highly attractive to the reader. Nevertheless, Austen makes clear that these qualities, however admirable in themselves, are inadequate. Proud as she is of her own "discrimination," Elizabeth is unable to distinguish appearance from reality, in the cases of Wickham, Bingley's true feelings for Jane, the virtues of Charlotte's acceptance of Mr. Collins' proposal of marriage, and (most importantly) Mr. Darcy's character. This is a traditional theme, but Austen adds to it a general recognition of the difficulties involved for anyone in making a true estimation of anyone's character. (pp. 118-122)

• Through her visit to Pemberley, Elizabeth is afforded insight at last into Darcy's true character. "In his home, Darcy is exemplary, and the description of his estate, though general, is a natural analogue of his social and moral character. Pemberley is a model estate, possessing those indications of value that Jane Austen everywhere provides in her descriptions of properly run estates...." (pp. 122-123) "[W]hen Elizabeth comes to exclaim to herself that 'to be mistress of Pemberley might be something' [cite omitted] she has, we might conjecture, come to recognize not merely the money and status of Pemberley, but its value as the setting of a traditional social and ethical orientation, its possibilities—seemingly now only hypothetical—as a context for her responsible social activity." (p. 124)

• Elizabeth's journey through the park at Pemberley is a spatial recapitulation of her changing views of Darcy, from her initial prejudiced impression of his pride to a final understanding of the core of his character. Austen's point is that changing one's viewpoint may afford new views of an individual, but it is the viewpoint that changes, not the nature of the thing (or person) viewed. (p. 125)

• Elizabeth comes to recognize Darcy's "proper pride" even as she sees it humbled. His attitude is "a well-established commitment to propriety in a time of collapsing standards―the pride of a responsible landlord who recognizes with some apprehension 'in days such as these' [cite omitted] that the norms by which men have lived for generations are in danger of neglect or destruction." (p. 126-127)

• Duckworth discusses the motif of "laughter" in P & P. In the eighteen century, laughter was a subject of widespread debate. Associated on the one hand with the freedom gained through the Revolution of 1688, it was also considered to be a sign of disharmony, lack of restraint, chaos. Darcy takes a conservative attitude toward laughter–he is described as "all grave propriety," he criticizes Jane Bennet because she smiles too much, and he proclaims his desire to avoid "those weaknesses which often expose a strong understanding to ridicule." Darcy appears to view laughter as subversive. (pp. 132-134) Elizabeth is described in contrasting terms as lively, playful, happy to tease and delighted by anything ridiculous. "Elizabeth, like Lord Shaftesbury, is a defender of raillery as a means of proving the worth of a person or idea." Elizabeth eventually moderates (but does not abandon) her playfulness (Georgianna must learn not to be shocked by her "lively, sportive manner" with Darcy) and Darcy learns the value of being laughed at. (pp. 135-140)

Chapter 4 (Emma and the Dangers of Individualism)

• While Mansfield Park focuses on the estate endangered by excessive individualism, Emma centers on an individual whose flaws become a danger to society as a whole. Emma resembles in some respects both Elizabeth Bennet and Mary Crawford. Because of Emma's position in the small and closed society at Highbury, and her greater powers of imagination, she is more of a social danger than Elizabeth, who is hedged about by her relative poverty (compared with Darcy and the Bingleys), her family, and the strong character of Darcy. As Edmund was required in MP to choose between Mary Crawford and Fanny Price, so Emma must choose between George Knightley and Frank Churchill. In the end, she chooses Knightley and a place in the inherited social order rather than Churchill and "a spontaneous and improvised existence." (pp. 147-148)

• Duckworth spends a significant amount of effort discussing and arguing against Arnold Kettle's Marxist interpretation of this novel and criticism of its author. (pp. 152-155)

• Knightley is another one of Austen's "professionals," like Edmund Bertram, Fitzwilliam Darcy or Mr. Gardiner. He is always at work around his estate or in Highbury, attending to his farming operations or the business of the local parish. He is the active benefactor and defender of those on the fringes of society like Mrs. and Miss Bates or Jane Fairfax. He is given much more of a chance than Darcy to demonstrate his social responsibility. Knightley exemplifies the kind of behavior and character Jane Austen considers necessary to maintain a morally founded society. (pp. 155-156)

• "[Emma's] relations with others typically reveal an egoism that goes beyond a social or moral selfishness to suggest a consciousness unaware of the real existence of others." Emma cannot notice that Mr. Elton is interested in courting her, or that Harriet Smith would be happy to marry Robert Martin, or that Frank Churchill is secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax and flirts with Emma to help disguise that fact, because the strength of her own beliefs to the contrary prevents her from perceiving these realities. (pp. 156-162)

• Duckworth discusses at length the motif of games, which runs throughout the novel. Games in the novel have no meaning in individual instances other than to reveal the characteristic deficiencies of the players. However, taken as a whole, games for Austen do signify, because they are antisocial, a threat to the structures of society and morality she affirms. Games are suspect because they establish a separate world of freedom from the ordinary rules and customs of society, and game players are suspect because while playing they are exempted from compliance with those customs and rules. (pp. 164-166) Frank Churchill's game playing "is symptomatic of a world in which once given certitudes of conduct are giving way to shifting standards and subjective orderings. Churchill rejects an inherited body of morals and manners for a little world he himself creates. He is at home in a world of opacity and separation, preferring it, indeed, to the older world where communication existed by way of public assumptions, for that world required responsibility and consistency, qualities conspicuous by their absence in his character." (p. 168)

• The episode at Box Hill "is an emblem of a vitiated society where selfishness is uncurbed and no publicly accepted rules of behavior permit free and 'open' communication. The party on Box Hill splits into three separated groups. When Emma so flagrantly insults Miss Bates, encouraged by Churchill, she violates a social contract by forgetting her social obligations and making Miss Bates the butt of her wit. Knightley rebukes her severely. "Only in the degree that Emma comes to an awareness of her fault and to an acceptance of the principles by which Knightley lives is a positive social alternative to the game world convincingly affirmed." (pp. 176-177)

Chapter 5 (Persuasion: The Estate Abandoned)

• In Mansfield Park, through the steadfast adherence of Fanny Price to her right principles, the "estate" is restored in the face of attempts by the Crawfords to overturn the normal social order. In Persuasion, Anne Elliott holds just as strongly to good principles, but with a different result—she is isolated and alone and her family estate, Kellynch Hall, is abandoned by her family. Unlike the heroines of Austen's other novels, who at the end of their stories marry appropriately and by doing so guarantee the continuity of their communities, Anne ends by marrying Captain Wentworth but in doing so accepts an existence outside of her family and away from her home, while her family continues in its heedless and profligate ways. (pp. 180-186)

• The figure of Captain Harville illustrates the proper response to misfortune (also exemplified by Anne herself): "however reduced or deprived the self may be, response may still be affirmative. Whatever evils the future may threaten, inner resources can supply the deficiencies of external equipment..." (p. 193)

• Duckworth places the story in Persuasion in the context of a contemporary debate over the appropriate degree of parental control over a daughter's choice of a marriage partner. Writers of the "romantic-revolutionary" school–Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Hays–argued that individuals should have complete freedom to make their own choices in these matters. More conservative writers–Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton–argued for a strong sense of filial duty and the right of parents to veto a daughter's choice, but not to force her to marry someone to whom she objected. (pp. 198-199)

Postscript (Sanditon)

• Like Mansfield Park, Sanditon takes its title from a place threatened by "improvements." Unlike her earlier works, there is little reason to believe thatthe improvements will be successfully resisted. Austen describes for the first time the world of the Regency: hectic, mobile, and in pursuit of novelty. Mr. Parker–an "enthusiast" and a "projector" (speculator)–is the last in a line of false trustees in Austen's fiction. He is an improver, but his improvements are intended as profitable speculations. Several of the major characters–besides Parker, Lady Denham and Sir Edward Denham–are intent on abandoning the old through improvements made in the hope of profit. (pp. 210-211)

• What exists ofSanditon concerns in part the move made by Parker from his old family seat to a new residence, built by himself, high on a bluff with a good ocean view. Parker abandons the old house to a tenant, in the face of regret and nostalgia from his wife, for a more fashionable location. (pp. 213-215)

• The heroine, Charlotte Haywood, leaves her well-established and old fashioned family at the invitation of the Parkers to visit them in Sanditon. She is a different character from earlier heroines: intelligent, sensible rather than naive, not prone to hasty or inaccurate judgments of others. Most important to Duckworth is that she does not seem to be committed to a particular form of society. Her function appears to be that of a neutral observer of and private commentator on the world around her.Duckworth sees her as representing Jane Austen's own attitudes. (pp. 216-222)

• The world of Sanditon is a world in which the heroine, although a fundamentally moral character, can no longer be an agent of social renewal. In this world, the ability to remain detached and amused in the face of universal selfishness is acceptable. This marks a change from earlier novels in which Austen criticized the detached observer–Henry Tilney or Elizabeth Bennet, for example. (pp. 221-222)

Fergus

Fergus—Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel

Introduction This introduction summarizes the book in extremely broad terms.

• Fergus argues that Austen's first three novels are different from her later three because: they are reacting against eighteenth-century literature to a greater degree; they are more explicit thematically; they contain more literary references and more interested in comparing themselves to other literature; they have more literary jokes (1).
• "Austen educates her readers' judgments and sympathies. She intends to instruct and to refine the emotions along with the perceptions and the moral sense." (3)
• Austen is "interested in an attempt to 'educate the emotions'" (4).
• "Although she accepts the eighteenth-century doctrine that literature should educate the emotions and the judgment, she rejects most of the literary conventions associated with the doctrine, and particularly the exemplary character." (5)
• "With equal force, Austen rejects eighteenth-century fiction which pretends to educate the emotions by indulging them. The sentimental novel rendered emotion, particularly distress, in order to provide the reader with opportunities for sympathy, then considered the great enlarger of the human spirit." (6)
• "Although she is fully aware of the recalcitrance of the average reader, she intends and designs her novels to exercise and challenge his responses." (6)
• To teach the reader, Austen uses contrasts: "She constructs among the feelings, judgments, predicaments and conduct of all her characters parallels and contrasts so elaborate and insistent that the reader cannot escape comparing, weighing and evaluating." (7)

1: Northanger Abbey This chapter is a very detailed reading of NA.

• "Northanger Abbey is simply comic and lacks most of the moral concerns and discriminations of the other Austen novels." (14)

• "Even if Catherine can be said to learn anything from Henry, it does not amount to a moral growth of any kind. For once, Austen fails to accord a moral dimension to the mastery of social (and in this case, literary) convention." (15)
• "Just as Austen shows no interest in placing Catherine within a complex world of moral perceptions and judgments, she neglects to provide for her the elaborate, fully-imagined and realized social world of the other heroines." (17)
• "Austen is simply not interested in showing a consistent or continuous development in Catherine's judgment or in her character. She prefers to call upon Catherine's shrewdness and her naïveté alternately, depending on which will create the most unexpected or incongruous effect." (18)

• "Both genres burlesqued, the sentimental novel and its Gothic offshoot, are now felt to be so ridiculous and so remote from life that exploding them seems gratuitous; but the sentimental burlesque is better received and more discussed" (20).

• "Her real interest is, evidently, more playful: she wants to bring off a tour de force, to expose her readers to everything absurd in a convention or genre and then to make the convention 'work' all the same." (20)
• Austen "takes very opportunity to mock and deflate the conventional distresses of novel heroines" in NA (21).
• "Austen intentionally sacrifices credibility in General Tilney's character in order to make the climax more shocking; the climax is meant to shock, meant to create in the reader those responses of sympathy and concern that the conventional distress of a sentimental heroine was supposed to excite, but with a difference. The self-indulgent tears, the 'refined susceptibilities, the tender emotions' of sentimental fiction are neither evoked in the reader nor displayed by the heroine." (24)

2: Sense and Sensibility This chapter is a close reading of S&S.

• "In Sense and Sensibility and the later novels . . . Austen elicits and manipulates the responses of judgment and sympathy, with a moral intention: to exercise, to develop and finally to educate these responses in her readers. As literary responses, judgment and sympathy differ from suspense and distress principally by engaging and implicating a reader more formidably: exercising judgment and sympathy challenges and tests a reader's perceptions, emotions, intelligence and moral sense." (39)
• "One of Austen's major interests in the novel is to define feeling and sensitive behaviour, and she shows that it includes a capacity to estimate and appreciate others' feelings along with a willingness to act so as to consider those feelings as much as possible. This behaviour is what Elinor exhibits and Marianne violates throughout the novel. It is Marianne who must learn to behave feelingly, not Elinor." (40-41)

• "In Sense and Sensibility, 'feeling' for others, a quality endowed with both an emotional and a moral dimension, is an obligation which, however necessary it is to the decencies of social life, may easily go unnoticed and unappreciated by those who benefit from it. Moreover, it is often painful in itself, comprising the pain of suppressing one's own feelings and the pain of participating in others' sufferings." (42)

• The novel is structured around contrasts such as "sense" and "sensibility", although Austen defines all of the terms herself very carefully. (44-46)
• "In Sense and Sensibility, the reader is presented with two modes of regulating feeling. Elinor governs the expression of her feelings according to social conventions, Marianne according to literary conventions. Austen dramatizes throughout the novel the consequences in conduct and feeling of each mode. She shows that conventional, polite behaviour which dictates the control of feeling is based on a truer perception of the nature of emotions than are the conventions of sensibility: social conventions permit and assist emotions like grief to become attenuated by natural processes, while the doctrines of sensibility undermine or falsify real feeling by seeking to perpetuate or increase it. In Sense and Sensibility, social conventions are an advantage to the self, assisting and supporting the fulfilment of personality, because at their best they codify careful, responsive and responsible consideration for the feelings of other people. . . . Real feeling, she declares, brings together private and public experience, or one's relations with oneself and with others. Real feeling goes deeper than manners and morals and conduct; it supplies the foundation upon which they should be constructed. Real feeling defines and fulfils personality; without it, the self is deformed and deadened." (51)

3: Pride and Prejudice and its Predecessors

• "of all her novels, Pride and Prejudice includes the most embedded, insistent and interesting links to earlier fictions" (61)
• Austen was a fan of Burney, Edgeworth, and Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (61)
• This chapter provides a comparison between Burney's Cecilia and Austen's P&P: there are structural similarities in the plot, the author's attitude towards the heroine, similar types of irony, and similar juxtapositions of manner for comic effect. (62-72)

• Like Austen, "Burney is interested in the emotions which make moral action difficult and in the moral principles which complicate emotions." (70)

• This chapter offers a comparison between Richardson's Grandison and P&P: "common concern with the accuracy and persistence of first impressions" (74) - between characters in the story and between author and reader (83); types of marriages are debated (74); an endearing and irritating wit (85)

4: Pride and Prejudice This is a close reading of P&P.

• P&P opens with an investigation of first impressions, like Sir Charles Grandison, and a survey of social conventions regarding marriage and the various characters' stances towards those conventions (87).
• The reader is misled into thinking Jane and Bingley are the heroine and hero (88).
• The discussion of pride is reminiscent of Burney's Cecilia, among other things (88).
• The early chapters of P&P are "discontinuous" and episodic (89).
• "the novel does successfully encourage its readers to follow Elizabeth Bennet in forming mistaken first impressions of the characters, in retaining them out of pride, and in finally relinquishing them. Austen intends, evidently, to write a didactic comedy of judgment, a comedy which implicates and educates the reader's critical judgment while relentlessly poking fun at it." (90)
• P&P is structured around parallels and contrasts as well as linear irony (90).

• EX: "Lady Catherine de Bourgh is very obviously a foil to Darcy, possessing his pride unalloyed by any wit, either as humour or as intelligence." (91)
• EX: "Mr. Bennet, for example, is a fixed character. He does not change in the novel. Throughout, his wit is meant to contrast with Elizabeth's, showing both his own imperception and irresponsibility as a father and the dangers of wit which Elizabeth usually escapes." (92)

• "The major structural device in Pride and Prejudice is the creation of ironies within the novel's action which, like parallels and contrasts, challenge the reader's attention and judgment throughout, and in the end also engage his feelings." (93)

• "Austen is relentless in poking fun at critical judgment. The creation of these linear ironies is only one of her techniques for doing so. The processes by which all discriminations are made are treated comically, even subversively. One of Austen's favourite ideas, emphasized in every one of her novels, is that good looks and charm can be depended on to produce a favourable response." (96)

• definition of comedy of manners: "this form deals with the relations and intrigues of gentlemen and ladies living in a polished and sophisticated society, evokes laughter mainly at the violations of social conventions and decorum, and relies for its effect in great part on the wit and sparkle of the dialogue." (98)

• Unlike Burney, Austen draws fine discriminations between her characters (100).
• Unlike Richardson, Austen's depiction of flirtation is more playful (105).
• Austen "exposes the imperception rather than the ugliness which pleasure in wit can produce. Nevertheless, she does demand that the reader register the inaccuracies of judgment encouraged by Elizabeth's wit." (107)
• In S&S and P&P, "speakers expose their characteristic faults or foibles by their various responses to a particular event or topic. . . . human misconduct can be understood as folly and vice, not as their modern counterparts, neurosis and a secularized notion of original sin." (108) - 18c tradition

• "In Austen's work, the comedy of manners (including the social and literary conventions which govern it, and the dialogue and conversations which shape it) increasingly allows the fullest expression and development of character, for her comedy is successful and expressive in direct proportion to her mastery of convention, especially dialogue." (118)
• Austen "is not persuaded that fiction can or should be exemplary. She recognizes instead that novel is likely to produce effects in the mind only, and seldom there: mental habits are as tenacious as any, and stock responses can be confidently expected of readers in preference to any others. . . . In Pride and Prejudice, Austen intentionally uses eighteenth-century literary devices to an eighteenth-century end, moral and emotional didacticism." (120)

Conclusion: The Later Novels

This chapter offers close readings of scenes from the last three novels. The major ideas of the book are repeated in respect to these novels. This chapter would be more helpful for the articles on these particular novels.

Ferguson

Ferguson—"Mansfield Park, Slavery, Colonialism, and Gender"

• "Mansfield Park (1814) is a eurocentric, post-abolition narrative that intertwines with a critique of gender relations and posits a world of humanitarian interactions between slave-owners and slaves." (118)
• "European women visibly signify the most egregiously and invisibly repressed of the text--African-Caribbeans themselves. They mark silent African-Caribbean rebels as well as their own disenfranchisement, class and gender victimization." (118)
• "Power relations within the community of Mansfield Park reenact the refashion plantocratic paradigms; those who work for Sir Thomas and his entourage both at home and abroad are locked into hierarchical and abusive patterns of behaviour, though under widely different circumstances." (121) EX: Mrs. Norris, perhaps named after the proslavery agitator John Norris whom Austen would have been aware of through reading Clarkson, is the overseer of MP (121); Sir Thomas is the "master" of Fanny and her removal from Portsmouth is told in terms like that of the slave narrative (122); Fanny must decides whose "chain" (necklace) to accept for the dance - she assimilates (123); Fanny's refusal to marry Henry Crawford demonstrates her rebellion, on the other hand, and Sir Bertram's language in describing her rebellion is similar to that which is used to describe slave rebellions (124).
• "Mansfield" is echoing the Mansfield decision, which was believed to have outlawed slavery in Britain (130).

Galperin

Galperin—The Historical Austen

Introduction

• Galperin emphasizes that he is writing against the trend of associating Austen with conservative literary and political trends (1).
• "Austen's historicizable achievement can be reckoned, following Scott, as an amalgam of the naturalizing and regulatory function that Roland Barthes describes as a reality effect (l'effet de réel) and a more oppositional marshaling of the everyday in what one early commentator described as an 'irresistible vraisemblance'" (4)
• Galperin's analysis rests on the work of Michel de Certeau; he is looking at time and the "probable" (7).

Part I

• Galperin's main topic of interest in Part I is Austen's relationship to realism. His contention is that she could not have participated in the realism project as we think of it because it did not exist as of yet - it was only defined retrospectively and was only in its "nascent state" (19-20). Instead, he maintains that Austen is more of a picturesque writer. He also emphasizes her attention to detail and the fact that contemporary readers picked up on this unusual feature of her writing - he does not seem to identify it as realism, though. He connects it to the concept of "probability". (23; 31) Relying on de Certeau, Galperin argues that Austen's writing is "oppositional" (29), that is, it attempts to undermine the structure of power by ever so slightly opposing them on the everyday level. (30-31) He calls Austen a "historian of the everyday" (31).

• Emphasizing the role of silences in Austen's own life (her aunt's trial) and her plots (adaptations from epistolary novels), Galperin ties silence to the real (but again, not realism). (41-43)

• Austen, for Galperin, engages in "picturesque realism" (46). Although Austen challenges element of this aesthetic theory, the dominant one of her day, she never totally abandons it and becomes a Romantic, for example. Austen uses her own version of the picturesque to tell a "history of the present" (70). Her kind of picturesque writing resists the didactic elements of later realist writing (77).

Part II

Gilbert and Gubar

Gilbert and Gubar—The Madwoman in the Attic

In their chapter "Shut Up in Prose: Austen's Juvenilia", Gilbert and Gubar (renowned feminist literary critics) focus on Austen's critique of patriarchal society, what effects she sees the literature of that society having on women, and the role of the woman writer. The chapter analyzes many of the juvenile works and Northanger Abbey.

• Women in Austen's novels "must acquiesce in their own confinement, no matter how stifling" because "they are too vulnerable in the world at large" (108). Austen's heroines are literally confined in the novels (EX: Fanny in her small house and the Dashwood sisters in their small house); "confinement" is not a metaphor for Austen, but a reality (124). In Northanger Abbey, she argues that women are "imprisoned more effectively by miseducation than by walls and and more by financial dependency . . . than by any verbal oath or warning" (135).

• Musing: Wollstonecraft also rewrites the Gothic in Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman. Is there a critic that compares these two? (Awadewit)

• Austen struggles against the rigid roles assigned to women in her society and repeatedly critiques the marriage market. Her primary weapon is irony (112). Importantly, Austen's irony is in a tradition of conservative writers (120)

• "in all her novels Austen examines the female powerlessness that underlies monetary pressure to marry, the injustice of inheritance laws, the ignorance of women denied formal education, the psychological vulnerability of the heiress or widow, the exploited dependency of the spinster, the boredom of the lady provided with no vocation" (136)
• Austen's novels investigate the very topics she dismisses in the romance tradition. By so doing, she reveals that "marriage is crucial because it is the only accessible form of self-definition for girls in her society" (127). The absence of any other topics emphasizes this and articulates the paucity of women's lives (127).

• Austen's irony and parody in her early works reveals how much she despises the sentimental tradition, a tradition that she sees as warping women's lives. They attempt to live out the fantasies found in sentimental novels (such as Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa (119)), thereby damning them to a deluded life (113-14). She criticizes "such novelistic clichés as love at first sight, the primacy of passion over all other emotions and/or duties, the chivalric exploits of the hero, the vulnerable sensitivity of the heroine, the lovers' proclaimed indifference to financial considerations, and the cruel crudity of parents" (115); these ideas are parodied in "Frederic and Elfrida" in particular. Sentimental novels have restricted women's desires to marriage, turning them into narcissists (118).

• EX: Laura and Sophia in Love and Friendship construct their lives around novelistic plots; "they epitomize the ways in which women have been tempted to forfeit interiority and the freedom of self-definition for literary roles." (119)
• EX: Catherine in Northanger Abbey is "in training for a heroine" (Austen); novels "miseducate" Catherine in Northanger Abbey: "teaching her to talk in inflated and stilted clichés, training her to expect impossibly villainous or virtuous behavior from people whose motives are more complex than she suspects, blinding her to the mundane selfishness of her contemporaries" (132).
• EX: Catherine's belief in NA that she can write her own story, construct herself as a heroine, is repudiated; "she must finally come to terms with herself as a creature of someone else's making" (like Mary Shelley's monster in Frankenstein) (142).

• Musing: Scholars have made this same argument regarding Wollstonecraft's two novels. I wonder if someone has compared them - that would be nice to include. G&G mention the connection between Wollstonecraft and Austen (116), but not in these specific terms (Awadewit)

• Austen's juvenilia can be characterized as "a zany picaresque", which differs from her more sedate later novels. (114)
• Austen is reacting against conduct book writers such as Hannah More, John Gregory and Hester Chapone (116).
• Austen's juvenilia, with its passive heroines, presages Simone de Beauvoir's]] picture of women who "give themselves up to gloomy and romantic daydreams" (Qtd. in 117).
• Austen recognizes that the literary world is dominated by men and their stories. EX: In Northanger Abbey, Catherine complains that history "tells [her] nothing that does nto either vex or weary [her]. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome" (Austen). Her parody of Goldsmiths' History of England is "authored" by "a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian" (Austen) (133). In such statements, Austen suggests that history is a masculine fiction and of little importance to women (134).

In their chapter "Jane Austen's Cover Story (and Its Secret Agents)", Gilbert and Gubar compare Austen to Maria Edgeworth, a more prominent novelist at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They argue that Austen's heroines all find a way to accommodate themselves to masculine power; often this means sacrificing creativity and imagination. Women, in Austen, develop a double consciousness: self and society are split.

• Many critics consider Austen's juvenilia as her most conservative work (153); Gilbert and Gubar argue, however, that hints of rebellion can be seen in it (153).
• "she dramatizes how and why female survival depends on gaining male approval and protection" (154). Austen's heroines consistently search for a replacement father figure, since their own are deficient (ex: Elizabeth, Emma) (154).

• Musing: Is there a connection to Alcott's Little Women here?

• "Whereas becoming a man means proving or testing oneself or earning a vocation, becoming a woman means relinquishing achievement and accommodating oneself to men and the spaces they provide." (154)

• EX: Persuasion: "Through both Mary and Louisa, then, Austen illustrates how growing up female constitutes a fall from freedom, autonomy, and strength into debilitating, degrading, ladylike dependency." (177)

• "Marianne's indulgence in sensibility almost causes her own death, the unfettered play of her imagination seeming to result in a terrible fever that represents how imaginative women are infected and sickened by their dreams." (156-57)

• Emma is another example of a heroine who must give up her imaginative play (158).
• "Not only does the female artist fail . . . her efforts are condemned as tyrannical and coercive." (159)

• Austen's heroines learn to silence themselves: Marianne, Emma (160-61)
• Like Emma, Austen's heroines are made to view their adolescent eroticism, their imaginative and physical activity, as an outgrown vitality incompatible with womanly restraint and survival." (161)
• Austen also uses her heroine's silence, submission and passivity to gain them power; they get what they want in the end (163).
• Mansfield Park is the most potent example of a woman's self being forced to fragment (163).
• Endings of novels: "Many critics have already noticed duplicity in the 'happy endings' of Austen's novels in which she brings her couples to the brink of bliss in such haste, or with such unlikely coincidences, or with such sarcasm that the entire message seems undercut" (169).

Harding

Harding―Regulated Hatred

Harding was a professor of psychology, working outside of his principal field, like Jenkyns and MacDonagh. The article is in two related (regulated?) parts.

Regulated Hatred

• Harding rejects as false the then-current popular impression of Austen and her work: urbane, genteel, a delicate satirist, "expressing the gentler virtues of a civilized social order". (166) "[T]he wide currency of this false impression is an indication of Jane Austen's success in an essential part of her complex intention as a writer: her books are, as she meant them to be, read and 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." (pp. 166-167)

• Harding calls attention to the presence in Austen's writing of unexpected astringencies, touches of criticism, the occasional sharp but brief change in tone. "In order to enjoy her books without disturbance those who retain the conventional notion of her work must always have had slightly to misread what she wrote at a number of scattered points, points where she took good care (not wittingly perhaps) that the misreading should be the easiest thing in the world." (p. 167)

• He cites as an example the famous speech by Henry Tilney in NA, reacting to Catherine's suspicion that General Tilney murdered his wife. Among all of Tilney's points praising English society, he mentions the unlikelihood that murder could go undetected "in a country like this, ...[w]here every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies." Harding suggests that this statement, "with its touch or paranoia", (167) is out of character with the rest of the speech and registers (in a subtle way) Jane Austen's discomfort with the claustrophobic situation in which she lived, surrounded at all times by her family, bathed in gossip and starved for privacy. (pp. 167-168)

• "Why is it that, holding the view she did of people's spying, Jane Austen should slip it in amongst Henry Tilney's eulogies of the age? By doing so she achieves two ends, ends which she may not have consciously aimed at. In such a speech from such a character, the remark is unexpected and unbelievable, with the result that it is quite unlikely to be taken in at all by many readers; it slips through their minds without creating a disturbance....The second end achieved by giving the remark such a context is that of off-setting it at once by more appreciative views of society and so refraining from indulging in exaggerated bitterness." (p. 168)

• In Emma, Austen says that Miss Bates "enjoys a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married." This is ordinary and skillful satire. However, Austen goes on to add that "she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement of herself, or frighten those who might hate her into outward respect." This goes beyond satire–Austen at this time was "neither young, handsome, rich, nor married" and this swift-passing "zinger" "perhaps hints at the functions which her unquestioned intellectual superiority may have had for her." (169) Harding describes this as an "eruption of fear and hatred into the relationships of everyday social life," (169) suggests that if it were too open the "urbane admirer" of Jane Austen would find it distasteful, and adds that this sort of eruption "chang[es] the flavor of the more ordinary satire amongst which it is embedded." (p. 169)

• "To speak of this aspect of her work as 'satire' is perhaps misleading. She has none of the underlying didactic intention ordinarily attributed to the satirist. Her object is not missionary; it is the more desperate one of merely finding some mode of existence for her critical attitudes. To her the first necessity was to keep on reasonably good terms with the associates of her everyday life; she had a deep need of their affection and a genuine respect for the ordered, decent civilization that they upheld. And yet she was sensitive to their crudenesses and complacencies and knew that her real existence depended on resisting many of the values they implied. The novels gave her a way out of this dilemma. This, rather than the ambition of entertaining a posterity of urbane gentlemen, was her motive force in writing. (p. 170) [Cf. the comments of MacDonagh in Chapter 6 of his book on how Emma illustrates the problems caused by the narrow scope of "society" in Highbury.]

• "[O]ne of Jane Austen's most successful methods is to offer her readers every excuse for regarding as rather exaggerated figures of fun people whom she herself detests and fears." Mrs. Bennet is a prime example: most readers perceive her as a "richly comic [character] about whom [they] can feel superior, condescending, perhaps a trifle sympathetic and above all heartily amused . . ." (171) To leave matters there is to ignore Austen's brief summary of Mrs. Bennet's character: "She was a woman of mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper." "How many women among Jane Austen's acquaintance and amongst her most complacent readers to the present day that phrase must describe!" (171) Austen can see how funny Mrs. Bennet is, but still detests her. (p. 171)

• Caricature is another of Austen's most important and subtle tools. It is often impossible to say where caricature ends and serious description of character begins. Mr. Collins in P & P is of course a broad caricature of an Anglican priest, but there is enough of the real world in his portrait, and in Austen's description of Elizabeth Bennet's precarious situation in life, to give real bite to Elizabeth's rejection of his proposal of marriage. "[T]he proposal scene is not only comic fantasy, but it is also, for Elizabeth, a taste of the fantastic nightmare in which economic and social institutions have such power over the values of personal relationships [cf. Duckworth] that the comic monster is nearly able to get her." (p. 171)

• Elizabeth Bennet has difficulty reconciling herself to Charlotte Lucas' choice to marry Mr. Collins. This parallels Austen's own situation: "The people she hated were tolerated, accepted, comfortably ensconced in the only human society she knew; they were, for her, society's embarrassing unconscious comment on itself." (172) Notwithstanding this difficulty, Elizabeth does not break with Charlotte, because Charlotte was the kind of friend "that went to make up the available social world which one could neither escape materially nor be independent of psychologically." (p. 172)

The Cinderella Motif

• Harding identifies a Cinderella theme in Austen's novels, "the Cinderella theme with the fairy godmother omitted. (173) "[I]n the first four of the finished novels the heroine's final position is, even in the worldly sense, always above her reasonable social expectations by conventional social standards, but corresponding to her natural worth." (173) Harding also describes an evolution of this theme across the novels. In NA, S & S and P & P, the theme is handled straightforwardly. "[T]he heroine of these early novels is herself the criterion of sound judgment and good feeling....none of the people she meets represents those values so effectively as she does herself." (174) Accordingly, she does not have to submit to another, better representative of virtue and good feeling, only to ally selectively with certain aspects of the characters of others. She stands independently. (174) This changes in MP, where Fanny is still "better" than the other characters but submits herself to the authority of Sir Thomas and then Edmund, influencing them by force of her example. (175) "[E]ven a heroine must owe a great deal of her character and values to the social world in which she had been moulded" and therefore the heroine cannot be "so solitary in her excellence as the earlier heroines are." (174) In Emma, it is even clearer that the heroine has taken in many of the objectionable features of the society around her and must learn from the people around her (Knightley in particular) how to behave with virtue and restraint. (176) "Emma's personality includes some of the tendencies and qualities that Austen most disliked", (177) but instead of embodying these in a caricature, Austen makes them a part of the personality of a character who is otherwise portrayed as having many fine qualities. (pp. 177)

Editorial comment: This article is well-written and worth reading. Harding accomplished a lot in very few pages. My principal reservation is that the article is premised on the idea that Harding understood what was in Austen's mind: e.g., hatred, detestation. This is plausible but amounts to an unexamined assumption; Harding doesn't bother to say why he infers what he does about her state of mind, other than by referring to parts of her works–to me this is circular. Better if he had discussed the issue and acknowledged its difficulties.

Editorial response: If this was written before 1965ish, that assumption would more than likely have gone unquestioned in literary criticism. It was not until what is called the "rise of theory" [insert long history] that literary critics began to refrain from saying "Austen means...", "Austen intended to say....", and the like. They replaced these statements with formulations like the following: "The text suggests..." and "The language seems to imply...."

Jenkyns

Jenkyns―A Fine Brush on Ivory

Jenkyns is a well-regarded professor of classics at Oxford - he is a critic, but of classical literature, not English literature. Jenkyns' book is a short, elegantly written presentation of his views on Jane Austen's work. His focus is not primarily biographical but on the works themselves. He has apparently read and digested much of recent Austen criticism but does not discuss it directly. Very few critics are mentioned by name - Mudrick is one. Almost all of his footnotes are to the works themselves rather than to other critical views. The first three chapters are fairly general, with recurring attention to Pride and Prejudice. The last three chapters deal with Mansfield Park, Emma and Sense and Sensibility, respectively. Simmaren 18:04, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

• Jenkyns emphasizes the dramatic qualities of Austen's writing, her use of dialog to set scenes, describe character and move the story along. In discussing the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice, Richard Jenkyns says that, after the opening lines, "...the rest of the chapter, until the last paragraph, is pure dialog, more like what we expect from a play than a conventional novel (Jane Austen is perhaps, after Dickens, the most theatrical of English novelists; she loved play-acting in her youth)." [pp.1-2] "To adjust the theatrical metaphor a little, the ironically detached sentences of aphorism and summary at either end frame the [first] chapter [of P & P]; everything in between is pure 'stage action', unmediated by authorial comment. Indeed, the author effaces herself to such an extent that most of the dialog in this first chapter comes without any formal indication of the speaker...since there is absolutely no 'scenery' it is rather like listening to a play on the radio. Simply as technique, this is remarkably bold, free and original." [ p. 3; see also pp. 46-47, 88, 129, 151.]

• Jenkyns asserts another important influence: "She has learnt from the theatre; but there was another public space that she knew much better. She will have heard readings from the Psalms in church almost every week of her life: their rhythms, with verse answering to verse, or half-verse to half-verse, echoing, amplifying, or explaining, were bound to sink deep in her consciousness....I do not suppose a conscious influence but an instinctive sense of balance and rhythmic expansion, nurtured in a world where the words of the Bible were all around one, in the air, as it were." [pp. 3-4]

• The world around Austen was one of personal and social flux. Sudden deaths of family members, her aunt Leigh-Perrot's indictment for grand larceny, the life story of her cousin Eliza de Feuillide, all spoke to this. Jenkyns cites Tomalin for the information that several of the most important landowners resident near Steventon were "new creations" and points out that two of her sibling's descendants became a bricklayer and a grocer's assistant. [p. 23] "Jane Austen understood such social flux: her women may have had the chance to make a brilliant match, but they also face the danger of a penurious spinsterhood, and if they attract a suitor who is below them in the social scale, they may have to weigh the odds and decide whether to accept or hold out for the uncertain chance of something better. Except perhaps for Northanger Abbey, that anxiety swims beneath the surface of all of her books, even Pride and Prejudice." [p. 26]

• In contrast to her depictions of people and manners, Austen's treatment of politics is sketchy. Jenkyns does not agree with the critics who describe Austen as a proponent of a Tory world view. He denies that she was ideological at all about politics, citing James Austen-Leigh's Memoir in support. [p. 185] "What must be said emphatically is that she does not praise the existing state of society." [p. 195] He gives as examples such flawed representatives of the status quo as Sir Walter Elliot [S & S], Sir Thomas Bertram (MP] and Emma Woodhouse's father; Austen's admiration of the Navy as an avenue of social mobility (the Crofts and Captain Wentworth in Persuasion); and her sympathetic portrayal of characters who are "in trade" or newly risen from it (Bingley and the Gardiners in P&P, the Westons and Frank Churchill in Emma). [pp. 34, 43-44, 153-154, 183-198]

• Jane Austen is unusually good at what Jenkyns calls "giving the sense of a hinterland....her ability to suggest, even with minor characters, that there is more to them than we see, or that they can be interpreted in more than one way." [ quote p. 43, also pp. 55-59]

• Jenkyns disagrees with those who say that Jane Austen "preaches female submissiveness in the married state." [p. 193] He cites a variety of evidence from the novels, including most prominently the Crofts in Persuasion, to support the proposition that Austen's idea of a good marriage is a "full partnership, not...submission to a figure of authority." [pp. 193-194, quote p. 194.]

• However, Jenkyns highlights the theme of the "imprisonment" of women in their family and social settings, citing as examples Fanny Price [pp. 143-145] and especially Emma Woodhouse [pp. 155-165]

Johnson

Johnson—Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel

Introduction: The Female Novelist and the Critical Tradition

• In this introduction, Johnson notes that during the 1780s and 1790s, it was perfectly respectable for women to write political and philosophical novels, but that by the teens, that was no longer the case. She uses the reception of Burney's The Wanderer as a case in point (xv).
• While acknowledging the groundbreaking work of the Chapman edition in the 1920s, Johnson challenges the idea that Chapman considered Austen equal to the other canonical writers (xvi-xvii).

• "To Chapman, Austen is in the canon not because of her social vision or even because of her formidable artistry, but rather because she had the good fortune to be able and the good taste to be willing to record the elegant manners of her time." (xvii)

• Johnson challenges Butler's reading in particular, arguing that Butler gives her no agency. Austen can only parrot the opinions of her class in Butler (according to Johnson). (xviii)
• She also criticizes those who follow in Butler's footsteps and assert that Austen is a conservative simply because she was part of the gentry. She argues that these arguments are not based on statements from Austen or her novels and that it is important to remember that Austen was "distressed gentlewoman", hardly wealthy. (xviii)
• Major claim: "how [Austen's fiction] emerges, draws, and departs from a largely feminine tradition of political novels, novels which are highly informed and often distinctly flexible, rather than ferociously partisan, in their sympathies" (xix).
  

1: The Novel of Crisis - In this chapter Johnson explains in broad terms how Austen indebted to the political novels of the 1790s. According to Johnson, Austen is neither a reformist nor a reactionary author, but one skeptical of the paternalistic ruling order and she uses subtle novelistic techniques drawn from other writers of the time to articulate this viewpoint.

• Johnson makes the point that women's lives became a testing ground for politics during the 1790s - their education, their relationships with men and their role as mothers, all became invested with political meaning (2-3).
• Johnson identifies Burke's Reflections on the Revolution on France as the founding text of conservative novels of the 1790s (4-5).

• "Burke apotheosizes the patriarchal ideal and the social and sentimental structures which enforce it: the retired life of the country gentleman, the orderly transmission of property, the stabilizing principle of generational continuity, the grateful deference of youth to venerable age, and of course the chastity of wives and daughters which alone can guarantee the social identity of men and heirs." (5)

• Johnson compares Austen to several conservative novelists in particular, namely Jane West, Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie and Hannah More.

• "Elizabeth Hamilton's novels are unmistakably conservative in their defense of established forms, but they are also remarkable in their refusal to be inflexibly doctrinaire and in their readiness to recognize and give way to at least some progressive social criticism." (9)

• "For [Elizabeth Hamilton], there is not much to reflect or opine about: the path of duty is always clear, and obedience to parents, fathers, and husbands is always proper. Far from requiring the endorsement of our reason, the established forms of state and family save us where reason fails. Thus the plots of conservative fiction do not so much clarify or simplify moral problems as they deny that any exist." (14)

• "the fictions conservative writers contrive do not invite us to inquire when the authority of fathers over children is every morally compromising, because the debate in which they are engaged requires them to demonstrate that the family itself is preeminently moral and moralizing." (10)
• "If conservative fiction opposes the autonomous efforts of reason unfavorable to the traditional practices enjoined by prejudice [Burkean prejudice], they by necessity tended to discredit reflection itself." (13)
• "The novels and conduct books by Hannah More and Jane West advance the strictest programs for female subordination and the most repressive standards of female propriety to counteract the influence of progressive ideas about women. Writing with avowedly counterrevolutionary intentions, West promotes a model of female excellence that is defined exclusively from the male point of view" (16). More even uses a male character at the center of Coelebs in Search of a Wife (17-19).

• Johnson spends a bit of time describing reformist novelists and how they are different from Austen as well, namely Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays.

• "Writers such as Wollstonecraft and Hays exposed and deplored the double standard in a liberal moral philosophy which is founded on rights to liberty and happiness all share prior to social contracts solely by virtue of being human, but which, in prohibiting women from making choices about their own lives, dictates fundamentally different codes of morality for men and women, unfits women for moral as well as for domestic duties, and entraps them in infantine dependency." (14)

• Because of the toxic atmosphere surrounding the topic of women and their rights following the publication of Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft, women novelists were forced to use "strategies of subversion and indirection" to make any statements that challenged the status quo (19).

• EX: Having an outrageous "female philosopher" character but using other characters to quote feminist views (Edgeworth's Belinda and Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers). (19-20)
• EX: Austen references Hamilton's story about muddying a dress in Modern Philosophers but turns it to a desirable element of the story (22).
• EX: "ironic parallels or multiple plots" (22) - Fanny and Mary in MP (23)
• EX: "adopt[ing] the narrative vantage point of marginal figures (25) - Burney in The Wanderer and Austen in MP and NA (25)
  

2: The Juvenilia and Northanger Abbey: The Authority of Men and Books - Johnson demonstrates how Austen's early works are responding to political novels of the 1790s.

• "When Austen, by such techniques as reduction, reversal, literalization, or hyperbole, seems most to 'make strange' the conventional elements of fiction, she often only alerts us to how strange they were before they were tampered with." (30)
• irony: "Austen's irony typically functions like a Mobius strip, first setting up two clear and discrete planes, and later showing them on the contrary to be coextensive." (31)
• "It is important that we see Austen's early work as exercises in stylistic and generic self-consciousness and not principally as expressions of personal belief, if we are to appreciate what is distinctive about her mature productions." (31)
• NA and the gothic: "Austen may dismiss 'alarms' concerning stock gothic machinery—storms, cabinets, curtains, manuscripts—with blithe amusement, but alarms concerning the central gothic figure, the tyrannical father, she concludes, are commensurate to the threat they actually pose." (35)

• "Gothic novels teach the deferent and self-deprecating Catherine to do what no one and nothing else does: to distrust paternal figures and to feel that her power of refusal is continuously under siege." (39)
• "in depicting a strange world of broken promises and betrayed trusts, Catherine's gothic novels and Northanger Abbey alike denude familiar institutions and figures of their amiable facades in order to depict the menacing aspect they can show to the marginalized" (43)
• Musing: Just like Wollstonecraft again! (Awadewit)

• "Female speech is never entirely repressed in Austen's fiction, but instead is dictated so as to mirror or otherwise reassure masculine desire." (37)

• "During the 1790s in particular, privileged classes felt their hegemony on language, and with that power, seriously challenged by radical social critics—some of them women, and many of the men self-educated—from below, and . . . conservatives met this challenge by asserting that the superiority of their language rendered them alone fit for participation in public life." (38-39)

• "To depict the respectable country gentleman not as one who binds himself benevolently and responsibly to inferiors, but who on th contrary behaves as though his social superiority absolved him from responsibility to inferiors, is to cross over into the territory of radical novelists, whose fictions expose petty tyrants of General Tilney's ilk. Not until Persuasion would Austen again arraign a figure of his stature so decisively." (46)

• "Depicting guardians of national, domestic, and even religious authority as socially destabilizing figures, Northanger Abbey has indeed appropriated the gothic, in a distinctively progressive way." (47)

3: Sense and Sensibility: Opinions Too Common and Too Dangerous - In this chapter Johnson argues that S&S is Austen's most political novel. It is, she contends, responding to contemporary debates regarding the position of the family in society, property and the sexuality of women.

• "Of all of Austen's novels, Sense and Sensibility is the most attuned to progressive social criticism. . . . the novel as a whole assails the dominant ideology of its time for privileging the greedy, mean-spirited, and pedestrian. Sense and Sensibility is not, as it is often assumed to be, a dramatized conduct book patly favoring female prudence over female impetuosity, as if those qualities could be discussed apart from the larger world of politics." (49-50) - S&S questions the codes of conduct laid out in conduct books (50)

• The title, S&S, suggests a binary that is not present in the novel. Marianne, ostensibly the character attached to "sensibility", is reasonable in her discussions of propriety (60) and Elinor, ostensibly the sensible one, is passionate in her feelings for Edward (63).

• S&S questions primogeniture and the arbitrariness of property inheritance; the Dashwood sisters are disinherited for arbitrary reasons that do not connect to Burkean principles of tradition (the old Mr. Dashwood likes the little baby Henry) (51-52).

• S&S also questions the ideology of charity that existed during the eighteenth century. John Dashwood expresses this sentimental charity quite clearly when he is deciding how much money to give his cousins, but rather than demonstrate generosity, he exhibits rapaciousness. (52-53)
• S&S is a novel of "matriarchs"; it shows the power, both good and bad, of women rather than of men (70).

• What makes Austen different from other writers: "The refusal to center her fiction on problematic sexual passion distinguishes Austen from her contemporaries, conservative and progressive alike." (55)

• Sexual tales are relegated to the sidelines for Austen (EX: Eliza's tale in S&S). "Far from being a cautionary tale about the duty of fidelity, Eliza's story, like so much of the central matter in Sense and Sensibility, indicts the license to coercion, corruption, and avarice available to grasping patriarchs and their eldest sons." (56); Austen uses the two Eliza's to suggest that their situation is not unique - it is not the result of one bad seducer. (57)
• The novels of the 1780s and 1790s as well as conduct books focused on the question of female modesty. The conservative ones advocated that a woman not fall in love until she was chosen by a man (West and Hamilton) while the progressive ones argued for female desire (Wollstonecraft and Hays). The endless discussions in S&S about whether or not Elinor and Marianne should reveal their feelings is a part of this debate. (60) Marianne's decision to be open about her feelings with Willoughby, while criticized and punished, is "never really scorned, or even fully dismissed" (61).

• In comparison to Darcy and Knightley, both Edward and Willoughby are "weak, duplicitous, and selfish, entirely lacking in that rectitude and forthrightness with which Austen is capable of endowing exemplary gentlemen when she wishes . . . these faults are described as the effects of established and accepted social practices for men of family, not as aberrations from them" (58).
• S&S "undermines, even though it cannot entirely elude, conventions about dying heroines." (68) For example, Marianne does not pine for Willoughby while she is "dying", she thinks of her mother and her sister, Elinor. (68)
• If S&S is seen as a novel that challenges the role of the family in society, MP and P suddenly look more like a series of novels considering the same topics; it is P&P that looks out of place, with its perfect harmony and excessive happiness. (72)

4: Pride and Prejudice and the Pursuit of Happiness - In this chapter Johnson claims that Austen accepts conservative myths regarding gender, property and marriage only to slyly undercut them. She creates a progressive heroine no one can fail to like.

• P&P is "almost shamelessly wish fulfilling" (73); "If Pride and Prejudice legitimizes a progressing yearning for pleasure, it also gratifies a conservative yearning for a strong, attentive, loving, and paradoxically perhaps, at times even submissive authority." (73); "fairy-take-like quality" (74)
• In P&P Austen "imagine[s] versions of authority responsive to criticism and capable of transformation" (74); "When we recall that Austen's preceding novel [S&S] could locate her protagonists' contentment only in a treat from and renunciation of power, Austen's decision here to engage her exceptionally argumentative antagonists in direct, extensive, and mutually improving debates can just as well be viewed as a step towards, rather than an 'escape' from, constructive political commentary." (74-75)

• As modern readers, we fail to appreciate just how radical a character Elizabeth was; Johnson describes her "outrageous unconventionality which . . . constantly verges not merely on impertinence but on impropriety." (75)

• Elizabeth's comments "border on the vulgar" (76); she is unafraid to say what she things (76); and she is an embodied character, who becomes winded and has flushed cheeks (76).
• "Austen's manifestly self-conscious achievement in Elizabeth Bennet thus consists precisely in having made her 'creature' so 'delightful' despite her continual infractions of the rules of propriety." (76) Lydia provides a "decoy" for any criticism of vivacious female behavior (76).
• The eroticism of the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy also marks P&P as a more progressive novel. Conservative novelists failed to discuss the physical reactions of their characters in the detail Austen does (90).

• The goal of the characters in P&P is to achieve happiness - a goal that Austen describes as moral, drawing on philosophy from earlier in the eighteenth century and Samuel Johnson (78-80). This reading contrasts with that offered by Butler, who sees the novel as a morality tale (83).
• In P&P, as in each of Austen's novels except for MP, the heroine(s) must think for herself; filial obedience, an important theme for Jacobin novelists (Hamilton, West and More), is rarely lauded by Austen. Her characters are independent of the family for a time (84) and exercise "personal choice and self-responsibility" (85). Austen celebrates rational friendships, like the one between Mrs. Gardiner and Elizabeth (85).

• Musing: This also sounds like Wollstonecraft (Awadewit).

• Austen refuses to acknowledge the full hierarchy of status suggested in conservative novels; Elizabeth and Darcy are on the same level, according to her - they were both born to gentlemen (88-90).

5: Mansfield Park: Confusions of Guilt and Revolutions of Mind - For Johnson, Mansfield Park is a novel that challenges the conservative novels of the 1790s because it uses their own ideology against them. The person who most closely follows conservative ideology (piety, filial obedience, modesty, etc.), Fanny, is the one most harmed in the novel. Conservative ideology is thus a failure for Austen.

• Fanny is a conduct-book heroine (95). "Austen accomplishes her critique of the gentry family by registering its impact on a heroine who, though a model of female virtue and filial gratitude, is betrayed by the same ethos she dutifully embraces." (96)
• "What is unusual . . . is [the novel's] exploration of the viewpoint of a heroine ideologically and emotionally identified with the benighted figures who coerce and mislead her. This painful and richly problematic identification makes Mansfield Park Austen's most, rather than her least, ironic novel and a bitter parody of conservative fiction." (96)

• "The most unsettling irony of Mansfield Park, then, is that the failures of conservative ideology fall, not exclusively, but still most heavily, on the only member of the household to believe in and act by it fully to the very end." (115-16)

• "Conservative apologists pitched their flag on the claim that the patriarchal family nurtured moral sentiments, and that the same affections that make us dutiful children and feeling siblings make us obedience subjects and responsible members of our neighborhoods. But in Mansfield Park, confidence in the moral tendencies, not simply of parental figures in particular, but of the family in general, is woefully misplaced." (99)

• "More than any other novel by Austen, Mansfield Park is a work of demystification"; it makes "an inquiry into the moral wardrobe of the venerable father himself." (100)

• Fanny trusts Sir Thomas and other male figures, but they betray her. She must learn to think for herself. This challenges the conservative notion that patriarchs will always care for those beneath them (103).

• on slavery issue: "Fanny herself is curious about slavery. But even though she appears to favor writers famous for abolitionist sympathies, such as Johnson and Cowper, there is no reason to assume that when she asks Sir Thomas 'about the slave trade' she is critical of the institution or uncomfortable with his role in it." (107)
• sex: "Austen uses sexualized details more extensively here than in any other novel, and they attest to Edmund's susceptibility to erotic enchantments." (110)
• feminism: "Mansfield Park adumbrates a phenomenon which has preoccupied modern feminists: the dependence of certain kinds of masculine discourse on feminine silence." (113)
• "From the Bertrams' point of view, the novel closes with a vengeance of reactionary formulas derived from conservative fiction: the demon aunt is cast out as a betrayer of the good man's trust, and the offending daughter banished to the hell of her perpetual company; the impious seductress is righteously spurned by the man of God, and her reprobate brother forever barred from happiness; the giddy heir apparent is sobered by instructive affliction, and the modest girl, in a triumph of passive aggression, is vindicated and rewarded with everything she wanted but never presumed to ask for." (114)
• Austen breaks down the good/bad binaries found in conservative fiction. (116)

6: Emma: "Woman, Lovely Woman Reigns Alone" - In this chapter, Johnson demonstrates that Emma is a powerful character who makes those around her bend to her desires, even, in the end, Knightley.

• Emma is a powerful heroine - she controls her home, her marriage choice, her community and her money (124); the novel explores the use Emma makes of her power (125).

• In addition to Emma, other women in the novel demonstrate their power as well: Mrs. Churchill and Mrs. Elton, for example. This novel, unlike MP, is not filled with dominating men (126).

• There are fewer allusions to political novels in Emma, but that does not make the novel apolitical. "At the height of her powers. Austen steps into her own authority in Emma, and she participates in the political tradition of fiction, not by qualifying or critiquing it from within, but rather by trying to write from its outsides." (126)
• Austen embraces class distinctions in this novel in order to depict powerful women (127)
• Emma controls Highbury and orchestrates the relationships between its people using diplomacy and tact (131).
• Emma is the figure of the female artist; she composes stories for people's lives - blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality (134-36).
• "Austen's refusal to expose and to arraign a heroine reprehensible by conventional standards shows how she parts company with conservative counterparts, and given the morally privileged position monitor figures of Knightley's ilk enjoy in their fiction, Austen's determination to establish a discrepancy between what he knows and what we know about Emma is daring." (141)

• "The conclusion which seemed tamely and placidly conservative thus takes an unexpected turn, as the guarantor order himself cedes a considerable portion of the power which custom has allowed him to expect. In moving to Hartfield, Knightley is sharing her home, and in placing himself within her domain, Knightley gives hi blessing to her rule." (143)

7: Persuasion: The "Unfeudal Tone of the Present Day"

• P is usually described as "autumnal"; "wistful and romantically unfulfilled in the twilight of her life, so the argument goes, the author grows tenderer on romantic subjects she had disparaged in the confidence and severity of her youth; with her own opening out onto a new world of emotion, eighteenth-century 'objectivity' yields to nineteenth-century 'subjectivity'; the assured, not to say simple-minded, gives way to the ambiguous and complex." (144)
• P is also interested in depictions of powerful women: Anne and Mrs. Croft, for example (146; 153).
• Like other progressive writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Austen contends in P that men and women should have the same morality (153).
• "Landed life is not taken to task simply because it promotes mediocrity or ignorance, but rather because its insularity is psychologically damaging, especially for women . . . a particularly narrow and unwholesome confinement [for women]" (158)
• Anne's statement in P: "We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual ocupation and change soon weaken impressions." - Next to this Edgeworth writes, in her copy of P, "That it does" (160).
• "Religious intimations are more frequent in Persuasion than in any of Austen's other novels and more enmeshed into its outlook." (163) - EX: references to Providence
• general statement: "Austen's novels are pervasively concerned . . . with achieving a more active, expansive, and personally fulfilling happiness, and they persistently suggest that this is well worth the striving." (164)
• general statement: "Not surprisingly, since they belong exclusively to the years which assured the reaction, Austen's last three novels reflect a strong sense of the increasing immovability of established authority." (165)
• general statement: "Among the least doctrinaire of all her contemporaries, Austen from the outset took on the material which political controversy endowed with such importance, without inviting or aggravating partisan impulses. During a time when all social criticism, particularly that which aimed at the institution of the family in general and the place of women in particular, came to be associated with the radical cause, Austen defended and enlarged a progressive middle ground that had been eaten away by the polarizing polemics born in the 1790s." (166)

Kirkham

Kirkham—Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction

Introduction

• "Austen's subject-matter is the central subject-matter of rational, or Enlightenment, feminism and . . . her viewpoint on the moral nature and status of women, female education, marriage, authority and the family, and the representation of women in literature is strikingly similar to that shown by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." (xi)
• "Through treating the Feminist Controversy of her time as the most important historical context of the Austen novels, I come to very different conclusions about their political import from those reached by Dr Marilyn Butler in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. She regards Austen's stance as a moralist, in the eighteenth-century sense of the world, as indicative of strongly conservative, if not downright reactionary political commitment. I regard it as indicative of her sympathy with the rational feminism of the Enlightenment. The disagreement turns on how one sees Jane Austen's insistence upon Reason as the supreme guide to conduct, from which follow her criticism of Romanticism and her belief that sexual passion ought to be subjected to rational restrain." (xii)

Part One: Feminism and Fiction: 1694-1798

• Much in this section is historical background on "the woman question".
• Austen's novels "are the culmination of a line of development in thought and fiction which goes back to the start of the eighteenth century, and which deserves to be called feminist since it was concerned with establishing the moral equality of men and women and the proper status of individual women as accountable beings" (3)
• "Her brother tells us that she admired [Sir Charles Grandison] particularly, though for reasons discussed below we should probably take this with a grain of salt. The evidence of Austen's own writings suggests a highly critical attitude to Grandison, and some antipathy to Richardson in general. The two references to Grandison in Austen's letters do not suggest admiration of either the work or its heroine." (30) - perhaps most important piece of evidence is the parody she wrote of it (31)
• "Austen, whose feminism immunised her pretty thoroughly against Romanticism, has little time for those who are too good or great to make equal marriages. Her heroines do not adore or worship their husbands, though they respect and love them. They are not, especially in the later novels, allowed to get married at all until the heroes have provided convincing evidence of appreciating their qualities of mind, and of accepting their power of rational judgement, as well as their good hearts." (31)
• "Austen criticises the belief that women's problems are to be solved by benevolent patriarchs. She does this by showing patriarchal figures as at best defective, like Mr Bennet, and at worst vicious, like General Tilney. Her heroines, especially the later ones, solve their own problems before making marriages with men who see themselves in a fraternal, rather than a patriarchal, relationship as husbands." (32)
• "As a feminist moralist, Jane Austen is in agreement with Wollstonecraft on so many points that it seems unlikely she had not read Vindication and approved of much of it, but there is no doubt either that she admired Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, and regarded them as her teachers. Burney and Edgeworth had, in her view, demonstrated that women had those 'powers of mind' which Wollstonecraft claimed as belonging to the second, as well as the first, sex." (34)

• Austen admired Burney's comedy and "it was though comedy that she herself was to show not only that patriarchal manners and moral were unjust to women, but that they were absurd" (35).

• "Perfect liberty, as Wollstonecraft says – and Austen implies – was, for man or woman (but especially for woman), to be found in the service of that Rational Principle which good Butlerian Anglicans still called God. The underlying argument of the Austen novels – and they are novels in which argument matters – is entirely in accord with this. It looks old-fashioned now, but it should be noted that Austen is often most radical, as a feminist, where she sounds most out-dated (and most like Mary Wollstonecraft)." (47)

Part Two: The Publication and Reception of Jane Austen's Novels, 1797-1818

• "if Jane Austen were at all like the woman described by Henry, she could hardly have written works which, though their irony, make serious criticisms of gross error in contemporary life and literature" (56)

• "Henry Austen's account of his sister's life and character was, I believe, designed to disarm ill-natured and illiberal criticism. Unfortunately, it has also had the effect, long after the feminist views of Jane Austen have become entirely respectable and a little old-fashioned, of giving a false, unduly limited impression of the novelist and of her engagement with feminist issues, as they were seen in her time." (57-8)

• "The received biography informs us about Jane Austen's family and domestic life, but leaves out a great deal that matters to the development of the novelist. The published letters are but a small selection of all those written, and have been subjected to a good deal of censorship. Our accepted portrait of the novelist is too often treated as though it were a fuller and more accurate likeness than it really is. In particular, the idea that Jane Austen was reluctant to publish and that the years she spent in Bath were unimportant need questioning, for there is reason to think that her failure to become a publishing author was connected with the Feminist Controversy; that she was well aware of this; and that the change in style and manner between the early and late novels came about partly as a response to the difficulties she encountered." (59-60)
• "The 'Northanger Defence' [of the novel] shows that Jane Austen did not regard herself as practising an art at all like that of the miniaturist or worker in ivory. And it shows that she held a self-conscious, feminist view of the tradition in which she, and other women, were establishing themselves as reputable novelists." (69)
• Kirkham claims that NA would have been viewed as part of the "Feminist Controversy" if it had been published earlier, in 1803, when Austen first tried (72).

Part Three: Allusion, Irony and Feminism in the Austen Novels

• "Jane Austen's heroines are not self-conscious feminists, yet they are all exemplary of the first claim of Enlightenment feminism: that women share the same moral nature as men, ought to share the same moral status, and exercise the same responsibility for their own conduct." (84)
• S&S begins by using the traditional pairing of contrasting heroines - one rash, one prudent - but the novel ends unsatisfactorily because both characters are well-rounded (86-87).
• NA follows in the burlesque tradition of Lennox's The Female Quixote, focusing on the errors that arise from reading; however, Austen does not wholeheartedly endorse the critique of the novel that such a form implies. Her "defense of the novel" in this book is evidence of that as is the fact that Catharine's views of General Tilney are actually well-founded (88-90).
• "In the three later novels, the main thrust of irony is against the errors of law, manners and customs, in failing to recognize women as the accountable beings they are, or ought to be; and against those forms of contemporary literature which render them 'objects of pity, bordering on contempt', by sentimentalising their weaknesses and making attractive what ought to be exposed as in need of correction. Austen's adherence to the central convictions of Enlightenment feminism becomes more marked and more forceful, and the scope of her comedy is enlarged, not by taking in a wider social spectrum, but by widening and deepening the range of allusive irony." (92)
• Austen contrasts Shakespeare's characters, which are drawn from nature, with Kotzebue's, which are artificial (97-98).

Part Four: Feminist Criticism of Society and Literature in the Later Novels

• Fanny's Christian submissiveness is meant to look "sexy" (102).
• Fanny is a British Sophie (102).
• "Austen created, in [Fanny], a heroine whom the unwary might take for something like the Rousseauist ideal of the perfect woman, but she expects her more discerning readers to see through it, and gives them a good many indications that this is not a proper reading." (104)

• "Fanny's feebleness is not a mark of Clarissa Harlowe-like saintliness, but it alludes to it and mocks it. Unlike Clarissa, who starts well and ends up as a rape victim resigned to death, Fanny improves in strength of mind and body as the novel progresses, and ends up married to the cousin she loves both passionately and rationally." (105)

• MP is structured like a three-act play, with the endings of the volumes even making references to going on and offstage (107).
• Extensive discussion of Kotzebue vs. Shakespeare (110-16)
• MP as a title alludes to the Mansfield Judgment, connecting the novel to slavery (116-17).

• "In this title, in making Sir Thomas Bertram a slave-owner abroad, and in exposing the moral condition of his wife in England, Jane Austen follows an analogy used in the Vindication between the slaves in the colonies and women, especially married women, at home." (117)

• "As in Wollstonecraft, the language of law and property, and the language of capture and captivation as applied to marriage and sexual relationships, is shown to be indecent." (118)
• Mansfield Park, far from being the work of conservative quietism that much twentieth-century criticism has turned it into, embodies Jane Austen's most ambitious and radical criticism of contemporary prejudice in society and in literature." (119)
• Emma is an adaptation of Kotzebue's The Birthday (121-123).

• "In Kotzebue, everything is solved by improbable discoveries of unsuspected kinship and tears which obliterate old grievances instantaneously. In Emma, the same basic situation is transformed so as to allow a serious, ironic and problematic examination of the relationship of father and daughter and its effect upon her character." (123)

• Emma, "in her role of devoted daughter, come[s] quite close to a sentimental stereotype. What Austen does is to show this aspect of her life and character in such a way as to criticise the romanticisation of devoted daughters. Emma's concern for her father, although endearing and amiable, is attended by many ill consequences, for it is a relationship in which a good deal of exploitation goes on, and in which Emma, through excessive devotion to him, fails to take adequate account of her responsibilities outside her family, and particularly towards other women." (125)
• Mr. Knightley is a critique of the aristocracy: he is willing to work, he does not go by "Sir", and he is not sexually dissolute (128).
• Emma is not a novel of education; "Mr. Knightley is as ignorant as Emma about the state of his own feelings and, though many of his criticisms of her are just in themselves, he is often motivated by unconscious jealousy and envy of Frank Churchill." (133)

• "If we miss . . . the careful way in which Austen balances her heroine's faults and merits against those of the hero - his irritability and her snobbishness; his generosity and warm affections and her charitableness and loyalty to her governess - we are likely to make Emma a much less interesting novel than it really is" (133).

• "No other Austen heroine is shown as putting a feminist viewpoint so plainly" (147) - Anne discussing women/men/books.

Notes

• This book details a lot of allusions and speculative inspirations for Austen's books, details that might be useful for the novel pages themselves.
• The last chapter of this book is a "this is what I think of the critical tradition" chapter.

Lascelles

Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art

Mary Lascelles published her monograph in 1939. It is notable as perhaps the first modern critical study of Austen's work. Part One of the book includes a brief biographical sketch and an essay on Jane Austen's reading (the identification of the books she read is largely inferred from her work) and her response to it. Part Two of the book includes a relatively short essay on Austen's style and a longer essay entitled "Narrative Art."

Biography

I mined the material in this section for the biographical portion of the article. I will therefore omit a summary here.

Reading and Response

• Lascelles believes that it is important, and possible, to determine what Jane Austen read and how it affected her writing. Specific information is available that identifies a few books: Austen was subscriber to Camilla, by Frances Burney, for example. Information concerning many of other books she is likely to have read can be gleaned by studying Austen's allusions to books in her writings. These allusions are of two types: tacit allusions which reflect the general influence of certain writers (Johnson, Cowper, Goldsmith, Gilpin) even if specific books and passages are not referred to directly, and explicit allusions mentioned directly in her stories, as Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho is mentioned in Northanger Abbey. (pp. 41-47)

• Taste in reading serves to differentiate character in Austen's work. Characters she does not like deprecate books she did: the Thorpes in NA dislike Richardson and Burney, and Sir Edward Denham in Sanditon considers Walter Scott's poetry insipid. (pp. 47-48)

• Austen's burlesques (in both the Juvenilia and the mature works) constitute both criticism of unsound artistic methods and indications of the things she would try her best to avoid in her own writing. (p. 49)

• Lascelles includes an extended (an interesting) discussion of burlesque, defined as mockery, critically directed, that expresses itself by means of imitation. All three elements are necessary: mockery, criticism and imitation. Lascelles identifies three types of burlesque: (1) exaggeration, displaced emphasis, or some other distortion given a mocking edge, (2) situations where a character's expectations, founded on reading fiction, are challenged and falsified by experience (Catherine Morland, Marianne Dashwood), and (3) where an author borrows a situation or course of action from fiction and translates it into the context of real life to demonstrate its lack of reality (elements of Mansfield Park and Emma). She then reviews a number of Austen's works to identify the burlesque elements in them. (pp. 55-72)

• Jane Austen accepts the then-current convention of the climax to the action, that is, of tension first increased, then snapped by some act more violent that those actions that preceded it. Lascelles reviews the climaxes to all of Austen's novels and shows how Austen's use of this convention evolved. In S & S and P & P, the "catastrophes" are almost conventional, although the violence is off-stage: the revelation of Willoughby's seduction and abandonment of Colonel Brandon's foster daughter, and the revelation of Wickham's attempt to seduce Georgianna. In Emma and Persuasion, Austen has moved on to catastrophes that are in reality illusions: the catastrophe in Emma (the supposed intrigue between Jane Fairfax and Mr. Dixon) is entirely a figment of Emma's imagination, and Louisa's fall from the Cobb only appears to lead to her death. (pp. 72-83)

Style

• Lascelles takes her definition of the term "style" from Samuel Johnson: "Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a stile." (p. 87)

• Austen disliked unnecessary elaboration of sentence structure. Austen's "hollow" people (Mr. Collins, General Tilney) have a taste for double negatives and rhetorical questions. (pp. 88-89)

• Austen uses descriptive details precisely, but sparingly. (pp. 89-90)

• Over the course of composition of her fiction, she learns to use a wide variety of tones both in her description and in dialog. For much of her work, her ability to portray the speech of plain, ordinary folk is limited, and tends to shade into humor (citing the Gardiners in P & P). By the time of Emma, however, she is able to be convincing. She chooses Miss Bates as the source of objective information critical to the plot, but has her provide that information in her normal mode of speech (slow, rambling, unfocused). Austen achieves this by modeling the idiosyncrasies of a character's speech in what Lascelles terms "low relief." Austen tends to show social variants in speech among her characters through syntax and phrasing of speech rather than through vocabulary.(pp. 90-103)

• Austen consistently practices only one grammatical irregularity, which Lascelles terms the "dislocated clause." (e.g., Lady Catherine speaking to Elizabeth in P & P: "While in their cradles, we planned the union.") Lascelles says that she found this "fault" in the prose of every one of the writers who were likely to have influenced Austen, but only occasionally; Austen uses it consistently. (p. 104)

• Lascelles talks about the strong influence of plays on Austen's dialog. (pp. 106-107) She also discusses the strong influence of Samuel Johnson as a model for her prose. This influence shows in her "aptitude for pregnant abstraction" (such phrases as "desultory good will" and "apparatus of happiness") and the use of antitheses. (pp. 107-110)

• Austen avoids "figures of speech" in her work, except as a mark of insincerity in her "disagreeable people" such as Mr. Elton, General Tilney and Mrs. Norris, whose dialog overflows with cliché. (pp. 111-115)

Narrative Art–the Narrator and His Material

• From the days of Walter Scott and George Henry Lewes to the present, Austen has been criticized for the narrowness of range of her imagination. [Her own comment about "the little bit(two inches wide) of ivory" on which she worked helped support this criticism.] Lascelles sets out to discuss the aesthetic reasons and impulses which caused her to limit her range to comedy and the world of the English gentry. (pp. 119-121)

• Austen insisted on the need of the novelist to select (e.g., in her advice to her niece Anna and in her well-known response to James Stannier Clarke).

• She confined herself to that part of the world with which she was familiar through direct observation because not because she was incapable of other things but because it was "the delight of her life." She also tried only two of a wide variety of narrative patterns: the epistolary novel, and the story told directly by an impersonal narrator. She repeatedly used the same narrative device: a marriage proposal precipitated by a misunderstanding as to an engagement. (pp. 121-125)

• A certain reticence is characteristic of Jane Austen and is part of this process of selection. In her novels, when lovers finally connect, she withdraws to direct narration and does not attempt to portray their conversation or feelings. The one exception to this rule, the last two chapters in the original version of Persuasion, proves the point, since she rewrote those chapters and conformed them to her usual practice. Additionally, she was careful not to include characters in her work who could be readily identified with someone she knew. (pp. 125-129)

• Other instances of this selection: the death of significant characters, coincidence and "luck" are not major factors in her stories. Except in The Watsons, Austen's main characters are not totally at the mercy of money (or its lack). There is no "mob rule" in her stories and no ideological enthusiasm. Austen's characters remain in familiar worlds and need not react to the remote or the unfamiliar. (pp. 129-133)

• There follow two extended discussions of (1) whether Austen's self-limitation to such narrow narrative territory "distort by its absence the impression made by what shes put in" (there is a long quotation from Virginia Woolf responding in the negative) and (2) the nature of Austen's comedy. Lascelles locates the foundation of Austen's comedy in incongruity between the character of a character and his or her position in the narrative (Malvolio as lover) or the position of a character and the position, given his or her nature, he or she ought to be in. Lascelles distinguishes between the incongruities on which the satirist focuses (the satirist disapproves of hypocrisy) and Austen, who may not approve of hypocrisy but finds amusement in it as long as it is not seriously harmful. (pp. 133-146)

• Lascelles feels that it is unprofitable to attempt study the plots of and the characterizations in Austen's novels separately. Mr. Collins in P & P is very broadly drawn, in some ways an absurd figure, but his actions and words are entirely consistent with the character Austen has given him and his role in the plot is critical. Lascelles goes on to discuss the role of other secondary characters in furthering the plot: Mrs. Jennings (in S & S), Mrs. Bennet, Mrs. Allen (in NA), Lady Catherine, and Mrs. Norris. (pp. 146-157) She then discusses the plots of the several novels and the ways in which the nature of particular characters is critical to their workings. (pp. 157-171)

• Care with facts is an important part of Austen's approach to her novels. She is known to have consulted almanacs and "road books" in evaluating a draft novel by her niece, Anna, and scholars suppose that she must have done so for her own work, which evidences a great deal of care in the details covered by these types of reference work. (pp. 171-173)

Narrative Art–the Narrator and His Reader

• The story teller has two related tasks, to bring the reader to the conclusion of the story and to hold the reader's attention along the way, without in either case allowing his or her efforts to become visible. The story teller may occasionally communicate directly with the reader, but more often must communicate indirectly through the consciousness of the characters. The story teller must use these means to direct the reader's attention to particularly important facts, or to give a sense of place or time. Lascelles gives examples from a variety of Austen's works. (pp. 173-194)

• Characters enable a novelist to give a sense of a boundless universe (rather than a constricted setting) in which their stories take place. [Male] English novelists–Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope–manage this through the abundance of the characters they portray. Austen's way is different. Her characters are not numerous but are drawn precisely to scale, with the most important in the foreground given the most extensive descriptions, and less important characters fading into the background and given less and less detailed descriptions, until the reader feels that there are more characters just out of sight because they are farther away and not necessary to the story. Lascelles suggests that Austen's portrayal of servants is an good example of this technique. (pp. 196-198)

• Lascelles discusses the question of point of view. Austen typically establishes the heroine's position as the point of view for the story. However, this is not always the narrator's position in the story. Often, Austen speaks through her heroines, but she also provides background and explanations directly and as narrator is pleased to make often satirical comments in her own voice. (pp. 198-208)

Leavis

Leavis—The Great Tradition

• This book is primary about Eliot, James, and Conrad. The first chapter mentions that an entire book would be needed on Austen. I read the first chapter, which had some global statements about Austen.
• "The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad" (1).
• "Fielding made Jane Austen possible" (3).
• "It was Fanny Burney who, by transposing [Richardson] into educated life, made it possible for Jane Austen to absorb what he had to teach her. Here we have one of the important lines of English literary history—Richardson—Fanny Burney—Jane Austen." (4)
• "Jane Austen's plots, and her novels in general, were put together very 'deliberately and calculatedly' (if not 'like a building'). But her interesting in 'composition' is not something to be put over against her interest in life; nor does she offer an 'aesthetic' 'value that is separable from moral significance. The principle of organization, and the principle of development, in her work is an intense moral interest of her own in life that is in the first place a preoccupation with certain problems that life compels on her as personal ones. She is intelligent and serious enough to be able to impersonalize her moral tensions as she strives, in her art, to become more fully conscious of them, and to learn what, in the interests of life, she ought to do with them. Without her intense moral preoccupation she wouldn't have been a great novelist." (7)

Litz

Litz—Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development

Chapter One: The Land of Fiction: Juvenilia and Lady Susan

• Jane Austen is the first modern novelist because she was the first to synthesize the achievements of Fielding and Richardson and both portray the flow of external events and the complexities of personal impressions. [This point follows Watt.] (p. 3)

• Litz describes the world of English novels as Austen saw it in her youth. Serious criticism began with Scott's review of Emma in 1815; before then, authors did not have the benefit of sustained and thoughtful criticism of their work. More novels were published each year from 1740 to 1790, but quality declined severely. Because books were so expensive, readers depended on circulating libraries, which often catered to the lowest common denominator in taste. The "land of fiction" Austen saw was a world in which characters behaved in accordance with convention rather than naturally and the author's point of view was determined by literary habit. Austen was provoked in the Juvenilia to carry the conventions of the sentimental novel to their illogical conclusions and then test them against reality. The result was burlesque, parody and irony. (pp. 4-6)

• There follows an interesting discussion of the sentimental novel against which Austen reacted in the Juvenilia and later in her own mature work. Litz discusses both the exaggerated expressions of feeling, the improbable plots and the "fictitious morality" embodied in these works. (pp. 7-14) Litz suggests (p. 13) that Austen's attack on the sentimental novel was in part an attack on those tendencies in herself. The conflict between those tendencies and her beliefs in reason and restraint gave life and coherence to her works. [editorial comment: more psychology]

• How did Austen learn the techniques of burlesque and parody? Through her reading, through the theatricals presented by her family, by reading (and perhaps discussing with them) her brothers' essays in their college periodical, The Loiterer, and more generally from the critical habits of mind of her family. (pp. 14-17)

• There follows (pp. 17-45 an extended discussion of the Juvenilia generally and of particular works in it: "Love and Friendship," "The Three Sisters," "Lesley Castle," "A Collection of Letters," "Evelyn," and "Catherine or the Bower," which is followed by a discussion of Lady Susan. Litz sees her work during this period (that which she chose to save) falling into three groupings: a series of burlesques culminating in "Love and Friendship;" the remainder of the works in the Juvenilia, which show Austen developing more complex narrative forms; and Lady Susan, "which stands squarely between the adolescent and mature works." (p. 17) During this period, Austen "roughed in" the social world o her major novels and discovered many of her characteristic themes. (p. 43)

• The timing of the composition of "Love and Friendship" (1790, the height popularity of the novel of sensibility and the beginnings or a reaction against it) and Northanger Abbey (1799 in its first version, the height of popularity of the Gothic novel and the beginning of a reaction against it) are evidence both that Jane Austen was familiar with contemporary literature and of her insight and independence of mind. (p. 19)

• Litz briefly mentions a number of the short pieces in Volume the First, describing how together they form a catalog of the incongruities in the novel of sensibility that caught Austen's eye. (pp. 22-24) The Three Sisters centers on the "motives of economic and social aggression" which later appear in all of Austen's mature fiction. In this story, one sister acts as narrator as well as participant in recounting another sister's consideration of an offer of marriage from an unattractive but wealthy gentleman. Litz notes that after making a copy of this story in her notebook, Austen later revised some of the language to reduce the extreme elements of burlesque. (pp. 25-26)

• Love and Friendship (Volume the Second) is a compendium of all of the stock situations and stock responses of the novel of sensibility, taken to extremes to expose the essential unreality and dishonesty of the world and people described. Since conspicuous display of emotion is the only index to value in this world, all other standards (honesty, generosity) are abandoned and the "moral sense" reduced to pure selfishness. Austen spoofs the convention under which frequent fainting equates to delicate sensibility, satirizes the convention of the "recognition" scene (four unknown grandchildren are discovered virtually simultaneously) and describes the inversion of values in which a "Sensible, well-informed, and Agreeable" young man is dismissed as a potential suitor because "we were convinced he had no soul, that he had never read the Sorrows of Werter, & that his Hair bore not the slightest resemblance to Auburn." (pp. 19-22)

• Lesley Castle (Volume the Second) is Austen's first attempt to create a variety of believable characters living in a realistic social world. Charlotte Lutterell, the protagonist, is Austen's first representative of "sense." Litz agrees with Mudrick that Charlotte is Austen's first character not dependent on a model in Austen's reading. Lady Susan Lesley is a forerunner of the title character in Lady Susan. Austen's tone in this story ranges from pure burlesque at the beginning and the end to a realistic analysis of manners in the middle portions. (pp. 26-28)

• A Collection of Letters (Volume the Second) evidences the same mixture of tone found in Lesley Castle. Litz believes that A Collection may be a take-off on Richardson's Familiar Letters. "Letter the Third" focuses on the relationship of a sensitive young lady without means and a brutal, domineering aristocratic lady, foreshadowing Austen's later description of Lady Catherine and Elizabeth Bennet. "Letter the Fourth" realistically describes a scene in which a conversation between two newly-introduced young ladies crashes to a halt when one reveals to the other that her parents are dead. The emotions portrayed here are those of real life and not of burlesque. (pp. 28-30)

• Evelyn (Volume the Third) provides a commentary on the "amiable" virtues of "benevolence" and "sympathy" by portraying a small English village where such virtues run rampant. While there is a general burlesque of the stock situations of the novel of sentiment, and some ironic comments on Gothic atmosphere and scenery, the main focus is on irrational and emotional generosity. Litz speculates that Austen concentrated her fire on this sentimental exaggeration because she saw it as a distortion of an important moral quality, the sympathetic imagination. Litz compares the almost allegorical description of the Village of Evelyn with the Bower in Catherine, or the Bower, which serves as a retreat for the heroine and a symbol of her social isolation and individuality. (pp. 31-36)

• Catherine, or the Bower (Volume the Third) is Austen's first full-scale attempt to place a heroine in a realistic social situation and probe her reactions to conventional morality and social convention. Catherine, the heroine, bears comparison with the heroine of Northanger Abbey, also an inexperienced young woman of natural sensibility whose tastes and attitudes have been shaped by reading. Catherine is caught between the rigidities of her aunt, who is fearful for Catherine's virtue, and the tempting world beyond her past experience, represented by the very unsuitable Edward Stanley. The story ends abruptly with Catherine dis-illusioned, and Litz speculates that Austen was unable to carry it forward because of her own ignorance of the world beyond Catherine's past experience. (pp. 36-39)

• Lady Susan was thought by Reginald Ferrers and Marvin Mudrick to be a crucial landmark in Jane Austen's development. Litz disagrees to a degree—Lady Susan is important but reflects only a stage in Austen's development in the mid-1790s. Various characteristics of the story resemble the fiction of an earlier time, of Burney or Richardson, rather than Austen's later work. The title character is the only character in Austen's fiction who is self-assured and completely free of self-deception and illusion. Lady Susan (the character) is an ideal of the amoral and predatory woman, and as such had no place in Austen's later fiction, which portrayed characters who were more complex in their motivations and less clear-sighted about themselves and others. (pp. 39-42)

• Lady Susan was "literary": in origin, as shown by Austen's explicit use of an antithesis between art and nature almost as rigid as that used by Mrs. Inchbald in her Nature and Art. Lady Susan's daughter is made to represent "nature" while Lady Susan herself represents "art" (or artifice). In Austen's later fiction, the antithesis remains but is more complex and much less obvious. (pp. 42-43)

• Ferrars and Mudrick make their case that in some sense Lady Susan is the "real" Jane Austen heroine, and that Austen's later development tended to "soft-pedal" the hard social realities described so clearly in Lady Susan, either from conformity or cowardice. Mudrick goes so far as to describe Lady Susan as a tragic victim who must use her intelligence and skills to survive in a hostile world. [Editorial comment: a fair reading of Lady Susan makes it hard to see the main character as anyone's victim.] To support his argument, Mudrick praises the literary qualities of the work, contending that it is lacking compared with the published novels only because it was not revised as they were. Litz disagrees strongly, judging that Lady Susan is not as brilliant as Love and Freindship or as promising as Catherine, but rather a "dead end" experiment in a dying form (the epistolary novel). (pp. 43-45)

• In writing the Juvenilia, Austen tested her own ear for the varieties of probable conversation by writing parodies of the dialog in contemporary novels. Litz suggests that an essay published by Austen's brothers in their magazine The Loiterer (No. 59, March 1790) making fun of the grammar, word choices and style used in contemporary fiction reflects her thoughts (influenced by her brothers) on stylistic matters. Litz denies that Austen's writing reflects a single style. He identifies three major styles of which she was master: the "Johnsonian style of his essay periodicals, a "pre-Romantic" style drawn from Cowper, Gilpin and the novels of sensibility, and the actual language she heard in the society around her. (pp. 45-49)

• Austen's dialog is strong because for each of her characters it is "specific, circumstantial, detailed, [and] highly individual." She uses very little metaphor or other figurative language, in reaction against the overuse of stock metaphors in contemporary fiction. In the Juvenilia, Austen mocked the improbable narrative methods of contemporary fiction―unmotivated narrative digressions, the crude handling of time, plot improbabilities, the rigidities of the epistolary form―and worked out her own preferences and the beginnings of her own mature style. In this she was influences by contemporary theater, Johnson's periodical essays, Burney's domestic fiction, and Richardson's attempts to describe individual consciousness. Even the novels of sensibility had a positive influence, in their efforts to show the human mind affected by a series of contemporary events, rather than simply narrating the events themselves. (pp. 51-53)

• Austen vigorously rejected the widespread contemporary view of the novel, exhibited in some respects even by Burney and Edgeworth in their defensive public attitudes, as a form without artistic merit and a bad moral influence. Her famous defense of the novel in Northanger Abbey is one visible sign of her position. Austen's work, and that of Scott and Edgeworth (which had a greater impact on the public), gradually convinced critics and the public of the worth of the genre. (pp. 53-57)

Chapter Two: The Sympathetic Imagination: Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility

• Viewed as a whole, NA is the earliest of Austen's major works. S & S and P & P were begun earlier, but both were revised extensively before publication in 1811 and 1813, while NA was last significantly revised in 1803. Evidence of style and narrative method support this conclusion: many of the characters are two-dimensional and Austen can't decide whether or not to use Henry Tilney as a substitute for her own voice as narrator–sometimes he seems to express Austen's judgments and irony for her and sometimes not. p. 58.

• Litz suggests that the "Gothic" subplot–Catherine's reading of Gothic novels and its effect on her behavior–may have been added after the original draft of the novel was completed. He notes that the chapters devoted to this subplot (1-2, 20-25) "form detachable units" and that references elsewhere to Gothic fiction and Catherine's role as a Gothic heroine could easily have been added in revision. p. 59. He reviews the brief vogue of this genre. pp. 59-60. He argues that there is no point in trying to find a single source for the Gothic elements in NA—it is a satire of the genre as a whole, not any particular work. Of the two strains of the Gothic, the violent and revolutionary fiction of (e.g.) Monk Lewis and the less extreme work of (e.g.) Mrs. Radcliffe, Austen's attention focused on the latter. pp. 60-61.

• Austen disliked the complacency that underlay Radcliffe's work. While Monk used Gothic devices to present (sensationally) certain psychological truths, Mrs. Radcliffe fostered a sense of remoteness in her Gothic fiction by setting her action far from Britain. The appeal of Radcliffe's work was based on the contrast between the dangers of the heroine's life, lived far away, and the security of the readers life in "safe and sane" Britain. Austen wanted to expose the sentimentality and fundamental unreality underlying this conception. General Tilney's abuse of Catherine and her flight from Northanger Abbey, alone and outcast, happen in England not southern Europe. Henry Tilney chastises Eleanor for misunderstanding Catherine's remark that "something very shocking indeed, will soon come out of London." Catherine is referring to a new Gothic novel, but Eleanor thinks she is saying that some rioting or other social disturbances are threatened. Henry criticizes Eleanor for overreacting, but Litz points out that the Gordon Riots of 1780s are the social background to this passage, and the idea of riots in London is not far-fetched. Catherine's exaggerated sensibility is one of Austen's targets here, but Henry Tilney's complacency is also in the cross-hairs. This ironic counterpoint continues in Henry's well-known rebuke when he understands that Catherine believes General Tilney to be a murderer. ("Remember the country and age in which we live....") Henry's comment that nothing bad can have happened because "every man [in England] is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies" does not suggest an idyllic society. pp. 61-65.

• NA explores the virtues and limitations of the sympathetic imagination, the faculty which promotes benevolence and generosity. Austen appreciates it but is concerned with how easily it can be deluded. In NA, Austen shows the dangers of sympathy untempered by reason and imagination. Catherine's education consists of learning this lesson. Austen deals here with a problem she explores many times, the problem of balancing reason and feeling, of controlling sympathy without destroying it. pp. 67-68.

• In NA, Austen experimented with several narrative methods she did not fully master. Austen's famous defense of the novel is an example. It is marred by overstatement, and when it appears it jars because it is presented in the voice of the omniscient narrator after a long period in which the author's views had been represented in the character of Henry Tilney. pp. 68-69.

• Litz views (and thinks "most readers would agree") that S & S is Austen's least interesting novel. It has the same kinds of flaws and inconsistencies as NA but lacks its freshness. It is important, however, because it poses the problems Austen solved in later novels. Many of the flaws come from the fact that the novel was so extensively revised over such a long time. Originally an epistolary novel, some of the longer speeches suggest an imperfect transition from the letter format, and there are clear indications of major stylistic revision. pp. 72-73.

• The standard thematic pattern of late eighteenth century moralistic fiction, in which opposite qualities of mind are embodied in opposed personalities, was the starting point for both S & S and P & P. In P & P, Austen transformed it almost completely, but in S & S she was not able to escape from it fully. S & S is evidence of Austen's ultimately successful struggle to advance past the conventional treatment of this theme. pp. 72-74. Litz goes on (interestingly) to compare S & S with Maria Edgeworth's Letters of Julia and Caroline, after suggesting Inchbald's Nature and Art and West's A Gossip's Story as possibilities for comparison. pp. 75-80. There is an interesting discussion of "the language of antithesis" from the strictures of which Litz says Austen had to free herself. pp. 77-78. He feels that she was only partly successful in doing so in S & S. "In Sense and Sensibility we often feel that the author is caught in the web of a language which tends to describe 'types,' not individuals." pp. 77-78. Partly, this is likely to have been a holdover from her original draft in epistolary format. p. 78. Based on the general description of the two sisters in Chapter I of S & S, Litz states that Austen intended to avoid the traditional stereotypes. p. 78. "Behind the debate between Elinor and Marianne we glimpse Jane Austen's own concern with the conflicting claims of reason and imagination, social custom and the free spirit. Her experience told her that Elinor's judgment and Marianne's sympathy both need qualification, but her attempts at this qualification in Sense and Sensibility are often merely verbal: we do not see them acted out, and therefore do not believe them." p. 79. As an example, Litz points to passages that deal with reactions to landscapes. "The reactions of the characters always push toward extremes." pp. 79-80. Litz also points to Austen's use of "type" characters such as Willoughby and Colonel Brandon. "The novel threatens at every turn to resolve itself into unrealistic antitheses, and we must finally conclude that in providing Marianne with a choice between Willoughby's weakness and Colonel Brandon's 'flannel waistcoat' Jane Austen was confessing her inability to transform the conventions inherited from other writers and embodied in the novel's original versions." pp. 80-81, quote p. 81.

• Litz describes Mudrick's theory of this novel: Austen abandoned the ironic attacks on sensibility found in the Juvenilia and moved to avoid feelings and the personal commitment they require by adopting an attitude of detachment and hiding behind socially accepted attitudes. Litz disagrees with this. Austen was clearly interested in S & S in finding a middle ground between reason and feelings, social convention and individual passions, but was unable to do so successfully because "it was the nature of the contemporary novel's form and language to sharpen, rather tha to lessen, antiheses." pp. 81-82.

Chapter Three: Into the Nineteenth Century: The Watsons and Pride and Prejudice

• Litz suggests that Austen abandoned The Watsons for two reasons: the death of her father and subsequent economic uncertainty, and the disappointment caused by Crosby's failure to publish Susan. p. 84. He views The Watsons as a turning point in Austen's artistic development. p. 84, 86.

• TW is characterized by what Mudrick called a "perfunctory," almost reflexive (and not very effective) irony and many missed opportunities for satire. Litz rejects the view that this marks TW as inferior to Austen's other more characteristically ironic works. "Jane Austen's great strength lay in the complexity, the multiplicity of her ways of seeing and expressing...." pp. 85-86.

• In TW, Austen confronts her major theme: the conflict between the free spirit and social-economic imperatives. It presents the plight of impoverished gentry in a society in which all of the old economic relationships are breaking down. For the first time, she presents this conflict not through contrasted characters (Elinor and Marianne) but in the mind of a single individual (Emma Watson). The heroine is an isolated and sensitive person without expectations who must make her own way in the world. In this, she resembles the heroines of Mansfield Park and especially Persuasion. As contrasted with S&S, there is an almost complete absence of the language of "Understanding," "Sensibility," "Wit" and "Imagination." Instead, Austen's focus is on contemporary manners and mores. pp. 86-89.

• Austen does something new in TW. The narrator virtually disappears, and all of the narratorial judgment is presented dramatically in dialog and descriptions of action. Austen leaves far more up to the reader, who must read "between the lines" or an understanding of the character's situations and relationships. Possibly, more of a "double vision" (dramatic description and narratorial comment) would have been added later in revision, but there is nothing in the existing fragment that evidences this. pp. 89-92.

• TW is also important because the manuscript survives and gives a good picture of Austen's methods of revision at this time. At some points, at least three stages of revision are evident. Many of the revisions are to dialog and tend to make a character's speech more distinct and more characteristic. Other revisions pare back descriptive detail or add realistic details of location and chronology. The dialog is revised to eliminate set speeches and move toward a fast-paced give-and-take. The particular examples chosen are interesting.pp. 92-97.

• Austen's revisions of S&S did not succeed in moving entirely away from the original structure and conception. P&P is different. It was so thoroughly revised that it is now impossible to say what the original drafts looked like. The style is much more consistent and sophisticated than that of S&S and the internal chronology is so consistent (suggesting the use of almanacs for 1811-1812) that the plot must have been completely reworked. Both S&S and P&P use stock characters inherited from the earlier Richardson-Burney tradition: the attractive seducer, the thoughtless young hoyden, ill-manner relatives, tyrannical aristocrats, elopements. These were part of her fictional experience. In P&P, these conventions are transformed and become a believable part of the action and a natural vehicle for the novel's themes. Litz compares Darcy with Colonel Brandon and Wickham with Willoughby to illustrate his point. pp. 97-100.

• In an older 18th century scheme, each quality, pride and prejudice, would have been represented by a separate character. IN P&P, each quality is found in both principal characters, Elizabeth and Darcy, and rather than a resolution in which one quality prevails, or in which some compromise unsatisfactory to both must be found, this novel is resolved with the union of both qualities, properly valued, in the married couple. pp. 100-103.

• Throughout P&P, aesthetic and moral values are closely related. One of the principal factors in changing Elizabeth's view of Darcy's character is the evidence of sound aesthetic judgment everywhere at hand during her visit to Darcy's home. pp. 103-104.

• Darcy and Elizabeth are flanked by characters who parody their basic tendencies - Mr. Bennet (ironic detachment) and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (social snobbery and rudeness). However, a different set of secondary characters "provides the full antidote to pride and prejudice." Elizabeth's relatives, the Gardiners, are "natural" aristocrats and stand as a rebuke to Darcy's social prejudices. Wickham (no natural aristocrat) demonstrates the fallibility of Elizabeth's perceptions and undermines her prejudice in favor of natural goodness. pp. 104-106. Litz argues for an organic connection between language and action, exemplified by the changing manner of speech between Elizabeth and Darcy. At the beginning of the novel, Elizabeth's speech is "lively" while Darcy's is somewhat stilted and very formal. As the story progresses, this difference in expression gradually narrows as each begins to appreciate the other. At the end, Elizabeth speaks somewhat formally with her father in defending her engagement to Darcy, and Darcy speaks warmly and engagingly in explaining himself and apologizing to Elizabeth during their walk. p. 106

• Litz traces the famous opening sentence of P&P to a very similar statement by Hymenaeus in Rambler No. 115. The opening sentence is ironic on several levels - by the end of the novel it is clear that the truth of the statement is acknowledged mainly by Mrs. Bennet and her avatars - but it is also a statement of the social and personal necessities which dominate the world in which the Bennets and the Darcys all live. p. 107. Austen's use of irony is complicated and dynamic. Her irony can only be fully understood in the context of the actions described in the novel. "The point about such complicated irony is that it depends on a full external revelation of the characters' inner natures; we rely more upon what they say and do than upon the author's comments." The first half of the novel depends mainly on dialog, just as a play would, and its dramatic qualities have been often noted. The second half uses a mixture of narrative, summary and dialog to carry the story. In moving from the first to the second half of the story, we do not lose interest "because the novel is unified by the indirect presence of Jane Austen's sensibility, and by the direct presence of Elizabeth Bennet as a commanding center of our interest." pp. 107-111.

Chapter Four: Counter-Truth: Mansfield Park

• The final revisions of P&P, the writing of MP and the writing of Emma all overlap in time. Contra some critics, Litz believes that MP is not a contradiction of Austen's inherent nature (supposedly reflected in the irony and humor in P&P and Emma) but rather a reflection of conscious choices on her part to emphasize values other than irony and humor. Litz accounts for some of the difference between P&P and MP by pointing to the fact that P&P began as a work of Austen's youth and reflects her early energy and vitality, while MP is a work entirely of Austen's maturity and among other things reflects the many changes in her circumstances between 1796 and 1813. Litz posits a growing awareness in the mature Austen of the dangers inherent in irony, the possibility that mockery or pretensions will become mockery of the underlying virtues those pretensions distort. pp. 112-116.

• Throughout Austen's work there is a tension between "neoclassicism" (the claims of society) and "romanticism" (the claims of the individual). The puzzle of MP is not that it emphasizes one side of this divide but that it is so uncompromising. Litz suggests that Eliza de Feuillide may have serves unconsciously as the model for Mary Crawford. He suggests that Eliza was instrumental in turning Henry Austen away from his original plans for the Church, and that in Eliza's relationship with her cousin Philadelphia Walter there was an analog with the relationship between Mary Crawford and Fanny Price. Eliza's flirtatious personality was similar to Mary's. "Whether Jane Austen did or did not have her cousin in mind is much less important than the clear evidence that the dilemma of Mansfield Park was of vital contemporary interest [to Austen], part of a clash between traditional notions of decorum and growing emphasis on freedom of personal expression." pp. 117-118. Quote p. 118. Details pp. 118-122.

• The amateur theatricals in MP are a device that provokes an emotional crisis and brings into focus the differences among the characters, their personal relationships and and their characters. The casting of Lovers' Vows is a clue to character and the play itself poses the basic moral problems of the novel. pp. 122-125. With its emphasis on feeling and disregard for traditional restraints, with its contempt for social form, Lovers' Vows stands as an emblem of those forces which threaten the neoclassical security of Mansfield Park. p. 125. The danger is not from the theater per se, but in the effect of acting on amateur players. p. 125. In the novel, a professed inability to act (Fanny's) is a moral accolade, while Henry Crawford's great acting talent is a index of his basic insincerity. Fanny at first is impressed with Crawford's performances in Lovers' Vows but learns his true nature as he talks about the "performance practice" required of a good preacher; Crawford is interested in the role, in the performance, and not in the essence of the priestly function. pp. 126-127.

• By taking for her heroine someone who is "essentially passive and uninteresting," Austen deliberately rejected the principal of personal growth and change which animates most English fiction. Fanny declines the role of Cinderella embodied (for example) in Elizabeth Bennet. Mansfield Park "is furnished with all of the characters of the Cinderella legend, but in the end the charming lover is rejected." p. 129. Lizt suggests that this choice by Austen is part of a general attack on the dangers of "fiction." MP is a work which questions the value of wit and imagination, and seems to say that virtue involves dullness. A failure of tone could be avoided only through "the author's presiding personality," which Austen in this novel couldn't or wouldn't assert. pp. 129-131.

Chapter Five: The Limits of Freedom: Emma

• The basic pattern of Emma, like the first half of P&P, is movement from self-delusion to self-recognition. The three major stages in the story all focus on Emms's inability to see others clearly, in the first part Mr. Elton, in the second Frank Churchill, and in the third George Knightley. In P&P, Elizabeth's faulty perception is corrected once and for all and the novel moves on to social issues of communication and reconciliation. The entire course of Emma is a constant process of emotional miscalculations and rational corrections. Knightley is successful with Emma as Sir Thomas Bertram is not with his own children because Knightley does not present himself as an opponent or censor of Emma but instead helps Emma liberate her own native good sense. pp. 132-134, 136-143.

• Emma is often taken as a summation of the eighteenth century novel (quoting C. S. Lewis to this effect). Litz feels that Emma is much closer to our own time. "Within Emma Woodhouse we discern the forces that will produce Emma Bovary, and all those other nineteenth century heroines whose illusions can only end in tragedy." p. 135.

• Emma herself is the center of the novel's world, and most of the action is seen through her eyes. Austen has learned to move in and out of Emma's mind as the story progresses, with a skill that has developed since the Juvenilia. The novel proceeds with a rhythmic alternation between expository passages which record Emma's thoughts and feelings and dramatic scenes which describe objective reality and provide the materials for Emma's inner life. We are not subsumed by Emma's viewpoint because Austen provides a constant ironic commentary that underlines her mis-perceptions and allows the reader to maintain an objective viewpoint. pp. 144-149.

Chapter Six: New Landscapes: Persuasion and Sanditon

• Landscapes take on a new importance in Austen's late works. Scenes in the earlier novels tends to be set indoors or if outside in a domesticated setting like a garden or an "improved" landscape. MP shows a new interest in "external nature" and the events in Emma Woodhouse's life are related to the cycle of the seasons. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot's low spirits are presented through the imagery of autumn. Sanditon is dominated by a sense of particular place and natural landscape. pp. 15-153. Litz posits that this development reflects the influence of the Romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century. Persuasion and Sanditon contain a number of explicit (satirical) references to contemporary poets (Byron, Wordsworth, Scott). "In their quiet and restrained fashion, Jane Austen's last works are part of the new movement in English literature. She has learned that the natural setting can convey, more surely than any abstract vocabulary, the movements of an individual imagination. P. 153.

• In Persuasion, Austen attempts something new. The heroine embedded in a community has disappeared and been replaced by the heroine completely isolated, emotionally estranged from her family and without a real friend. Anne Elliot needs love, but also needs as badly to communicate intimately. This reflects one of her strongest themes, "the perils of the free spirit in its search for social identity." Litz feels that Austen is expressing her alarm at contemporary changes in manners and society, and thereby looking forward to the nineteenth century English novel. In the new dispensation, individuals confront society alone without the support that comes in an earlier time (and earlier Austen novels)from family and the surrounding community. pp. 153-155.

• Persuasion differs from the earlier novels in that the drama of the heroine's self-deception and self-recognition is largely absent. This severely limits Austen's opportunities for deploying her normal irony. The story is told almost entirely from Anne's viewpoint, with one brief excursion into the mind of Frederick Wentworth. pp. 155-156.

"*Litz presents an interesting discussion (pp. 156-160), based on the surviving manuscript of the last two chapters, of the changes Austen made in rewriting the ending of the novel and of her working methods.

• The surviving chapters of Sanditon leave us completely uncertain of the way the novel would have developed - this is not true of the beginning portions of any of Austen's other novels. The strong attack in Sanditon on "complacent invalidism" must surely reflect Austen's contemporary (and final)illness and perhaps constitutes self-criticism. In its remaining state, Sanditon constitutes a return (in a new setting and time) to earlier themes - sense versus sensibility, parody and burlesque of contemporary jargon and manners, preoccupation with contemporary literature. Litz argues that these characteristics make Sanditon a private composition, intended for family amusement and not for publication. Litz sees it as a defense against illness and depression. pp. 160-169.

Lynch

Lynch—The Economy of Character

Lynch is interesting in breaking down the traditional arguments regarding the self and society in Austen and emphasizing the roles of the "commonplace" in her fiction; Lynch sees Austen's characters are developing a socially-based subjectivity. Moreover, she argues that Austen's heroines are much less individualized than we might at first expect; they resemble bookish narrators more than real people. Her chapter, "Jane Austen and the Social Machine", has many detailed readings of individual novels; this is another work that would assist in writing individual novels pages.

• chapter thesis: "I am here to demonstrate how Austen's novels position interiority at a relay point that articulates the personal with the mass-produced." (210)

• Austen insists "on articulating the individuated language of the heroine's psyche with the impersonal language of the commonplace" (210)
• "Characters who are rarely alone with their thoughts—characters who instead are perpetually anxious about keeping the lines of communication open and the wheels of conversation turning—are precisely those whom Austen chooses for her heroines." (210)
• "Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion present the language of real feeling as a language of undertone, uttered under a blanket of noise." (239)

• "As a whole Austen's writing is about social relations—the relationship between, say, domestic life and public life—and about reading relations—about the textual conventions by which audiences are formed and distinguished. Her narratives weave together the processes of romantic choice and cultural discrimination." (216)
• "Austen's account of how Elizabeth comes to realize the inadequacy of 'first impressions' not only bespeaks the value Austen places on human complexity and capacity for change through time but also incorporates lessons in literary experience. With the happy ending that rewards Elizabeth for her reperusals of letters and second looks at Darcy's portrait—rewards for her rereadings that uncover inner meanings and acknowledge that 'character' is something that can never be definitively deciphered—Austen reinforces her proposals to her readers about what it means to really read." (218)
• fairy tale element: "Persuasion rewrites the Cinderella narrative, as it shifts the fairy tale's emphasis from the heroine's transformation into a beauty to the prince's second look at her face." (219)
• Austen heroines use the drawing room to hide their personal feelings; such banal conversations allow them to have a private life because they are restricted from mentioning anything truly intimate (231).

• "the heroine's adherence to the codes of manners—her association with safe topics nd the usual inquiries—can as easily be viewed as a manipulation that makes manners into a cover for privacy" (236)
• "self-effacement secures self-possession" (236)

• Austen's novels are often structured using a pair of characters, one with a public romantic life and one with a private romantic life. The heroine is the one with the private romantic life. EX: Elinor (232)
• "Austen takes the mechanical part of novel writing, as well as the mechanical aspects of social life, as a conscious object of study. For this reason she is as interested in the banalizing of meaning that accompanies the reiteration of novel slang and the empty formalities of common civility as she is in the intensification of meaning that produces the inner lives of characters." (237)

• "Austen does more, however, than comply with the fictional convention that locates authentic subjectivity with the woman who is not favored by the public voice; she also casts her protagonists as the silent and sympathetic observers of other people's stories and the repositories of their secrets." (233) EX: Elinor and Anne
• Anne and Elinor take on the position of the narrator - they know all of the secrets and their language describing other characters resembles that of a third-person narrator. EX: Elinor describing Edward (233-34)
• "That Elinor's mind is full of other people's feelings and the usual civilities suggests how Austen renders interiority a social space." (238)
• reading of the first line of P&P: "the narrator seems to hand over her text to the voice of the cultural context. The narrator moves over to make room not only for a rendering of subjective consciousness in its own idiom, but also for a rendering of the secondhand idiom of a vox populi" (238) [Note: Contrast with reading of sentence as voice of Mrs. Bennet]

• Traditional readings of Austen:

• "Customarily, Austen's position within histories of the novel is pinpointed by relating her to a concept of 'romantic individualism.' Either she is against it, as we are told by the scholarship associating her with an anti-Jacobin recoil fromt he cult of sensibility and the moral claims of individual feeling, or she finds in her novels the same means—specifically, her use of free indirect discourse—of bringing about an ideal blend of the individual and the social, rehabilitating sensibility for the nineteenth-century novel's sociocentric world." (212)
• "Critical consensus has it that Northanger, published posthumously in 1818, was written in the 1790s and revised for the last time in 1803." (224)
• the conventions of drawing-room culture have the power to make Austen's most adamant individualists fall into line" (231)
• "Arguments for recognizing Sense and Sensibility's centrality in the history of the novel often proceed by applauding Austen's use of free indirect discourse and her reworking of the form of the epistolary novel and by suggesting that the language of inward experience these innovations produce is capable of conveying what is most authentically individual about the individual." (234)
• Austen uses free indirect discourse "(1) to supply the illusion of entry into a character's consciousness and (2) to suggest a zone of meaning too deep to sustain direct utterance" (237)

MacDonagh

MacDonagh—Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds

Oliver MacDonagh was a highly regarded historian of English and Irish history and not a literary critic, a fact for which he almost apologizes in his introduction. ("I have striven hard to remember my place as an uninvited guest worker in an advanced and highly complex system of production.") He identifies two purposes of his book: (1) to see what light the novels of Jane Austen can shed on the history of England for the period 1792-1817, and (2) to see how the history of the period can illuminate her novels. His book is of lighter weight (literally and figuratively) than Butler's, but is interesting for its information on the social history of the period.

Chapter 1 (Religion: Mansfield Park)

• Jane Austen's life spanned the beginnings of a great movement in church reform, which moved parallel to but later in time than similar reform movements in public administration, politics and universities. This movement concerned such issues as non-resident clergy, simultaneous holding of several "livings" (pluralism), part-time clergy, clerical education and professional training, sources of clerical income, rights of "presentation" to "livings" including the sale of those rights, the crisis presented by urbanization and industrialization, the religion of the heart, conversion and enthusiasm. The impact of the movement can be seen in the different career paths and attitudes of George Austen and his sons James and Henry. [pp. 1-4, 14, 16-18]
• [T]he shift in popular expectations and accepted standards in the church between the 1780's and the 1830's was marked and clear; and Mansfield Park both stands at the crossroads in time, and must have been informed by the author's intimate knowledge of this revolutionary or evolutionary process." [p. 4]
• Jane Austen was "a conscientious and believing churchwoman." Her letters suggest that she became more serious as she became older. Those references in her remaining letters suggest that Austen was an orthodox Anglican, that she conceived of the Anglican church (in patriotic terms) as national in character, that she was pleased with "the increasing religiosity and advance in public morality" in England during her lifetime, and that she generally disliked but also respected Evangelicalism for its public influence. [pp. 4, 6-7]
• Mansfield Park begins with the unreformed church, the world of livings controlled by local landowners, the sale of "future interests" in livings, pluralism and non-resident clergy. Early in the book, in defending his choice of career from Mary Crawford, Edmund argues first that there is nothing wrong with the prospect of a living and that the clergy are important as influences through their own example toward proper conduct on the part of their parishioners. Henry Crawford, by contrast, sees the church as a stage for role-playing and self-exploration, as a way to display good taste and manipulate others' minds. His view is devoid of any spiritual component or sense of responsibility to the community. [pp. 7-10]
• Fanny's role in the novel is to stand for spirituality and proper morality. It is she who most clearly characterizes Henry Crawford's affair with Maria in religious terms, in the language of sin, guilt and punishment. She is portrayed as an earnest, strict and struggling Christian, not perfect but trying hard. [pp. 11-12]
• There is one conversion in MP, that of Sir Thomas Bertram, who comes to realize that his daughters' tragedy was rooted in the superficiality of their religious understanding and commitment. [p. 13]
• To all of the burning issues in the church of Jane Austen's adulthood, the response in M is moderate. Wholsale reform of the church is not suggested, but the reform of individuals is. The clergyman remains central to the order and government of the countryside. Evangelicanism and emotional indulgence in religion are implicitly rejected, but not the doctrines which infuse them: sin, hell, atonement, and redemption. [p. 14]

Chapter 2 (The Female Economy: Lady Susan, The Watsons and Pride and Prejudice)

• In Lady Susan, the protagonist (Lady Susan Vernon) is evil, always choosing the heartless or selfish course of action, but attractive. She is physically attractive, intelligent, well-spoken, and evokes the sympathy accorded to the underdog. Her attractiveness to the reader is her role as "...the champion of women in the everlasting tournament between the sexes. Every man whom she encounters in the novel is subdued." [pp. 21-22] "Despite the ultimate thwarting of Lady Susan's full design, the novel as a whole seems to celebrate female power. Its lietmotif is Lady Susan's obsession with subduing men. Nor has she any intention of submitting to reciprocal enslavement." [p. 27]
• The worldly marriage is the theme of The Watsons, based on a female economy in which the odds for marriage heavily favor those young women whose fathers can and will pay money as a dowry. Physical attractiveness and "accomplishments" are helpful but insufficient in the absence of adequate funds for a marriage settlement. [p. 31] The Watson family does not have the money for dowries for its four daughters or to support them adequately after their father dies. "Matrimony was their only hope of escape from current penury and future ruin or near-ruin. Dowerless, they were pursuing it with varying degrees of ruthlessness." [pp. 28-31]
• In Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas is contrasted with Elizabeth Bennet as the proponent of"career" marriage for women. "Charlotte's ultimate justification lay in her obedience to the social law which laid down that middle-class young women without resources tended to be lonely, purposeless and very poor if they could not attain such a union." [pp. 32-34] While marriage for love is clearly the ideal in P & P, Austen "allows" Charlotte Lucas to make a rational case for pragmatic or "career" marriage and it is presented as common practice. [p. 35] There follows a discussion of Jane Austen's love affair with Tom Lefroy, which foundered on just such prudential issues, and her extremely brief engagement with Harris Bigg-Wither, in which considerations other than money and position played the deciding role. [pp. 35-41]
• MacDonagh points out that none of the marriages in Austen's fiction of which she approved was imprudent financially. [p. 43]

Chapter 3 (Receiving and Spending: Sense and Sensibility)

• In this chapter, MacDonagh argues that Jane Austen's work was firmly grounded in contemporary economic reality. "Jane Austen knew the exact value of money, as gained, lost and used by her particular class." [p. 43] "Jane Austen was accustomed from childhood to hear money matters discussed in informed and detailed fashion; and the lessons she learned were driven home by her own comparative poverty." [p. 44] There follows a discussion of the economic successes of the Austen family and its vulnerabilities as far as Mrs. Austen, Jane and Cassandra were concerned. Austen's experience included not only the type of fringe gentry represented by her own family, but also the lives of the very well-to-do represented by her uncle, James Leigh-Perrot and her brother Edward. [pp. 43-51]
• In Sense and Sensibility, Austen is precise and detailed in describing exactly what kind of life was available at various income levels. Each level of income is correlated exactly to a particular style of living. "Money constitutes a sort of underlying beat below the narrative. Even the central antithesis of the book can be expressed—though this is far from saying that it was meant primarily or deliberately to be expressed—in economic terms." [pp. 58-61] "People are rewarded financially according to their expectations or avarice rather than their merits. The good need competences but the wicked may prosper more." [p. 62]
• One remarkable feature of S & S is the homogeneity of its internal society: on the strength of their distant family tie to Mrs. Jennings, the Steele sisters (very poor) were house guests of the Middletons and the John Dashwoods. [p. 58]

Chapter 4 (Girlhood: Catherine or the Bower, Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice)

• "The stage of courtship was the culmination of girlhood, and Jane Austen was too clear-sighted to suppose that this was always or altogether a passive experience, or one initiated only by a man. Northanger Abbey is an almost book-long exposition of this truth, with a delicate delineation of the outermost limits which female pride and propriety might touch in pursuit of the objective." [p. 69]
• How were girls to decide about husbands and marriage? "There were many initial considerations: sufficiency of money, parity of rank, the sort of family to be joined, the location of the new home, and seriousness of principal and religion. Beyond these, of course, personal attraction mattered....Reason and prudence should be counsellors, not kings." Austen was alive to the difficulties girls faced in weighing all of these factors, some of them objective and some highly subjective. [p. 72]
• Austen was very much aware of the potential risks of one consequence of marriage, child=bearing. Many women of her acquaintance, and a few very close to her, died in or immediately after childbirth. [p. 73]
• For Austen, marriage and children were a girl's natural and best aspiration. She advocated sincere attachment, material prudence and circumspect delay in the choice of a marriage partner. If the appropriate conditions were met, then marriage should follow. "Whatever the risks, it was the accepted—and for nine-tenths of the people, the only—mode of self-fulfillment for women." [pp. 74-75]
• Jane Austen generally spoke of women, compared to men, in deprecatory terms. She did not respect female capacities where they intruded in areas "reserved" for men. [MacDonagh cites the famous JA reply to Rev. J. S. Clark declining to undertake a novel based on a clergyman, as Clark had urged, on the grounds of her lack of education.] "She seemed almost determined to argue against intellectuality or erudition in or for girls." Austen herself was remarkably knowledgeable about English literature, history, religion and general culture. "Yet either she did not realize or she concealed the extent of her own attainments; and this was emblematic of her attitude to girls' education." Austen did not think well of girls' schools generally. She liked even less the approach to girls' education that emphasized refinement and accomplishments. [pp. 75-77]
• Catherine, or the Bower presents Jane Austen's more positive ideas about female education. Catherine is described as widely read in modern history and literature "of a lighter kind." Catherine is contrasted with Camilla, who is at best a superficial reader uninterested in cultivating her own mind. This difference accounts for the great difference in moral development between the two girls. "Camilla is not vicious by nature, but vain, vapid and materialistic by education. Kitty [Catherine] falls into errors from inexperience and impulsiveness, but has acquired the fundamentals of judgment and self-control by serious reading and application." [pp. 78-79]
• "The bringing up of girls is an underlying theme of Catherine. There is no suggestion that their education should emulate or even equal boys'....Jane Austen took classics to be the bedrock of advanced education, and this was almost universally denied to females. Yet she evidently regarded her own sort of education...as the feminine counterpart to the sort of intellectual gymnasium which the classics were meant to afford boys. The mind was not only accumulatively furnished, it was also exercised into strength and power." [p. 80]
• Catherine (in Northanger Abbey) "embodied Jane Austen's values. She did so by nature rather than philosophy....Catherine stands for various qualities which Jane Austen, in principle at any rate, prized most in a girl: artlessness, sincerity, directness and simplicity. In all this, Isabella Thorpe is the complete foil." [p. 82]
• Henry Tilney "educated" Catherine, but Catherine also had something to teach the Tilneys. "From time to time, her utter candour cuts more deeply than the stock opinion of the sophisticated." MacDonagh cites her comments on history ("the quarrels of popes and kings") and education ("You think me foolish to call instruction a torment....") [pp. 84-85]
• "Girls are the problem in Pride and Prejudice." At least eight girls in the novel are reasonably fully described, and "all pose essentially the same question to themselves or others―how were they to be settled in the world?" MacDonagh draws the contrast between Elizabeth Bennet on the one hand and Lydia Bennet and Charlotte Lucas on the other. Elizabeth and Lydia were raised in the same way, but Elizabeth benefited from the example of her older sister, Jane, while Lydia was uninterested in models. The most important difference between the two sisters was their education. In the laissez-faire approach of the Bennet family to matters educational, Elizabeth had taken the trouble to acquire an education while Lydia remained idle and ignorant. Charlotte, on the other hand, is distinguished from Elizabeth not by any difference in education but in the lessons learned from it. Charlotte is cold and rational in assessing her marital prospects and accepting Mr. Collins' proposal, which Austen portrays as perhaps understandable but a bad choice. [pp. 89-96]

Chapter 5 (Families: Persuasion)

• This is a long chapter, and it is mostly focussed on Jane Austen's family―a great deal of biographical detail is given for her parents, siblings, and some nieces and nephews. MacDonagh describes the (by today's standards) amazing solidarity and mutual regard of the Austen family and concludes that they approached the ideal of the contemporary family in their relations with each other.
• MacDonagh contrasts the Austen family with the Elliott family, which he describes as essentially unhappy. "Persuasion is deeply concerned with both the crushing and sustaining forces, the attractive and repulsive powers, the narrowing and expansive tendencies implicit in family relations." [p. 97] If Anne Elliott is unhappy, her family is the cause. "She was undervalued and carelessly degraded by both her father and elder sister." [p. 98] Vanity was the fundamental flaw in the Elliott character. Sir Walter could do little except admire his own heritage and position as a baronet, and Anne's older sister Elizabeth was apparently destined to be a spinster because she "could not stoop to the level of attainable marriages." [p. 99]
• "The Elliotts constitute a disharmonious and (in its dominant members) selfish and unfeeling group. Their polar opposites in the novel are the Crofts, including Mrs. Croft's brother, Captain Wentworth. The Crofts are deeply affectionate towards each other, inter-supportive, quite above artifice or pretense, kind, modest and truth-telling." [p. 100]
• Captain Wentworth also represents a different "happy family," the Royal Navy. "...Persuasion presents the Navy...as 'that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance....'" All of this is embodied in Austen's portrayal of the Harvilles, who "equal the Crofts in naval virtue, household and general alike." [p. 102]
• The Musgroves represent a middle position between the Crofts and the Elliotts, showing some faults ("deficient in education and refinement") but on the whole a positive example of family life. To the extent that the Musgroves fell short of the ideal family, it was largely due to the influence of an Elliott, Anne's sister Mary.[pp. 103-107]

Chapter 6 (Social Traffic: Emma)

• Emma differs from Jane Austen's other novels in at least two important respects: there are fewer speaking characters than the other novels (sixteen, of which three have very little to say) and the action occurs in a single place, Highbury. This conforms most closely to Austen's preferred formula for a novel's characters and setting: "3 or 4 Families in a Country Village." [pp. 129-130]
• Highbury has the full spectrum of levels of a hierarchical society: the gentry (Knightley and Woodhouse), the near-gentry (Elton, Weston and Cole), the professionals (the attorney, the apothecary, Mrs, Goddard the schoolmistress), the shopkeepers, artisans, servants, and the undeserving poor. There last three levels are clearly present in the novel but mainly as undifferentiated background. While these categories are conceptually distinct, the members of each form a continuum rather than a set of distinct social groups. [pp. 131-134]
• MacDonagh notes interestingly that in Highbury it is impossible to avoid someone because one dislikes them personally. [p. 134]
• "Emma presents a comparatively self-enclosed and static social organism, with clearly understood principles of stratification. Yet, within this society, social mobility, though circumscribed, is marked—not so much in the conventional sense of escalation and descent as in the more interesting Heraclitean sense of flux—while in practice social gathering is neither determined by personal choice nor hemmed in by rank. How is the dualism to be explained? The answer would appear to be—another paradox—stagnation and paucity of numbers." In all cases, the limited number of social possibilities ensures that members of theoretically distinct social levels will socialize: Emma dines with the Coles, Robert Martin dines with Knightley at Donwell, Mrs. Goddard dines with Emma's father. [pp. 134-135]
• "It is the group which ultimately sustains each individual and provides him or her with his or her measure of harmony and order. But for Jane Austen this group was domestic, not national or regional or economic, in basis. Its primary form was of course the family....beyond this was what we might name, for want of a better term, the 'vicinage'—the village or small town equivalent of the 'county' or 'quality'....In such a community or sub-community, antagonism, no less than preference, rank and taste, had to be restrained if a tolerable level of harmony were to subsist." [p. 136] MacDonagh then goes on to draw a comparison between these social dynamics and the social dynamics present in Chawton while Jane Austen lived there, and finds many parallels. [pp. 136-143]

Chapter 7 (The Final Phase: Sanditon)

• MacDonagh begins this chapter with a description of the Regency period and a discussion of the usefulness to historians of periodization. He notes that the concept of "the Regency" is relatively indistinct, depending on the subject matter—politics, economics, furniture and furnishings. [pp. 146-148]
• Steven Watson, historian of the reign of George III, identifies three key characteristics or emblems of the Regency period: architectural style, fashion and the fad for the seaside holiday. All three are the focus of Sanditon. Austen, however, also identified and treated at length additional characteristics of the Regency period: political economy, Romanticism and the pursuit of bodily health. [pp. 149-151]

• Austen contrasts the values of Mr. Haywood ("old fashioned") and Mr. Price, the "projector" (speculator) at the center of the story. MacDonagh sees Parker as a kind of proto-Keynesian, advocating "...for investment, for expenditure, for inflation, for consumerism, and for economic growth as the basis for general prosperity...." MacDonagh points out that the end of the war with France brought "the great depression of the nineteenth century...with mass demobilization, a drastic reduction in public expenditure and in the money supply, catastrophic falls in demand, and galloping unemployment." These issues were highly topical in 1817. [pp. 152-153]
• Sanditon continues the mockery of Romanticism found in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, and carries it almost to the point of parody in Austen's characterization of Sir Edward Denham. MacDonagh notes this character's use of then-highly fashionable jargon, such as the prefixes "hyper," "pseudo" and "anti." [pp. 153-157]
• "Jane Austen was committed also to guying certain aspects of the medical revolution, in particular, the cult of physical well-being, self-doctoring and hypochondria. Orthodox medicine was spared; neither physicians nor criticism of physicians appear in Sanditon. It is only imaginary health and sickness which are sent up." [pp. 157-162]

• MacDonagh feels that in Sanditon Jane Austen produced her most "modern" novel, that it in some respects resembles and anticipates the work of the Brontës and Dickens in "the unwonted savagery and even coarseness of [its irony...[and] its systematic use of comic exaggeration." Nevertheless, he views it as an intermediate work, similar to the best contemporary novelists and unlike the later Victorian authors in its "economy of style and composition, ...ease of marksmanship, and...freedom from sentimentality...." [pp. 162-163]

Mudrick

Mudrick―Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery

____

Chapter One: The Literary Pretext (Juvenilia)

• Mudrick's approach to Jane Austen is based in psychology (perhaps Freud, although I haven't seen that yet). His basic idea is that Austen used irony as a defense mechanism to maintain a necessary critical distance from the narrative and from the reader. "To events, literary or actual, she allowed herself no public response except for the socially conventional or the ironic; for neither of these endangered her reserve, both put off commitment and feeling, both maintained the distance between author and reader, or author and subject: both were, primarily, defenses." p. 1.

• Mudrick sees development over the course of Austen's work. In her early work (the Juvenilia), she relied upon irony based on incongruities, as well as satire and parody, to maintain the necessary distance. As her letters show, this was her natural mode. In her later work, she still used irony but added another tool, social convention. p.1.

• Austen found irony everywhere, "between being and seeming, between–in a social setting–man as he is and man as he aspires to be." p. 3.

• From her earliest surviving works, Austen's target was the popular novel of sentiment, for which Mudrick uses [coins?] the term "lachrymose novel." Austen felt that the authors of these novels, by adhering to conventions of behavior so remote from actual human behavior, had no artistic right to engage their readers' emotions. pp. 4-5. Mudrick discusses the conventions of the lachrymose novel. First was the epistolary form, by which the author implies that the story related is true and the "author" is really only an editor. At another level, another set of conventions: the heroine must live a life of misfortune and adventure, she must be young and virtuous, and her virtue must be measured by her sensibility, "and since sensibility thrives on adventure, anything unadventurous or domestic–like a formal courtship...must be proved trivial or wicked." Finally, the young woman, or her older self, gives a detailed, self-conscious account of her life and feelings to some friend. pp. 6-7. "Every character susceptible of vibration is ready in a moment with his autobiography." p. 8. An exotic ancestry and a cloistered but intellectual upbringing are de rigueur. Illegitimacy comes to be displayed as a badge of honor. pp. 8-9. "Sensibility becomes the name and vindication of every anarchically self-indulgent impulse. Vanity becomes a high romantic duty." p. 9. Love at first sight is demanded of sympathetic minds. "At moments of crisis, a character exhibits the proper degree of sensibility by weeping, or swooning, or going off into fainting-fits, or running mad, or even dying." pp. 9-10. The lives of characters are circumscribed by the need to associate only with others having the proper degree of sensibility. Society has no claims on individuals of sensibility—its rules and conventions are to be ignored or subverted. Normal social values are inverted. pp. 10-11. Employment is beneath the dignity of persons of sensibility; accordingly, to survive, it is necessary to steal. pp. 12-13. However, the protagonist of sensibility must observe some limits on self-indulgence; Sophia advises her friend in Love and Freindship to "beware of swoons Dear Laura....—Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint—" pp. 13-14.

• Love and Freindship begins as a parody of the circulating-library novels Austen read so avidly. "For the parodist, life is simply the unvarying standard, the accepted and inclusive reality, by which he demonstrates the absurdity of bad art...." p. 15. For Austen, "life" was the middle-class [is class analysis anachronistic?] society of her time, which gave her an orderly set of values to contrast to the unacceptable values exemplified in the sentimental novel. For the familiar middle class virtues, the lachrymose novel substituted sensibility, passionate love, and a rejection of responsibility to and withdrawal from society. Mudrick notes that the values of novels of sensibility—sensibility, passionate love—were regarded by bourgeois society as peculiarly feminine. Middle class women of the late eighteenth century had good reasons to emphasize these values, because courtship and marriage were the only social arena in which they could exercise power and influence. "Jane Austen was the only woman writer to oppose the tide of feminine sensibility in the novels of her time." pp. 16-17. She moves beyond this, however, to exercise her irony on the values of the bourgeois world itself. The real world is not, after all, a better or prettier place than the world imagined by the lachrymose novel, it is only more orderly and more stable. "This kind of world...is amusing, it teems with incongruities, and it does not threaten Jane Austen's unpenetrated reserve." pp. 18-19.

• The world created by the lachrymose novel is unsafe and had to be rejected because it is based on feeling, and deals with matters of adult sexuality (rape, incest, adultery, out-of-wedlock pregnancy), which threatened the teen-aged Austen with "the great, unknown, adult commitment of sexual love." p. 19.

• Mudrick briefly discusses a substantial number of the shorter pieces in the Juvenalia. He argues that Austen's purpose in the History of England was not simply to lampoon Goldsmith, denigrate the Tudors or glorify the Stuarts, but to show that history was "another unverifiable illusionary world" (like the novel of sensibility!). A serious interest in history demanded serious partisanship and commitment, and Austen wished to avoid these things, to preserve her detachment. pp. 19-25.

• With The Three Sisters, Lesley Castle and Catherine or the Bower, Austen began to move away from parody toward self-sustaining characterization and plot. The characters in Catherine foreshadow well-known characters in the later novels (Catherine = Elizabeth Bennet, Edward Stanley = Wickham, Catherine's aunt = Mrs. Norris). Lesley Castle contains Austen's first independently achieved character, Charlotte Lutterell, and describes for the first time the "hard, pushing, materialist, feminine world, with all its energies drained into the crucial business of courtship and marriage, or into housewifery, that plausible facsimile of marriage." pp. 27-29. In The Three Sisters, Austen dealt with the conventions of courtship and marriage and "the materialist personality beneath the moral pretension" more directly than in any of her other work. p. 31.

• Mudrick sees Austen as someone who was "steadily wary," who felt she had to keep her distance from the threat of contact [with whom?], most important from the ultimate commitment of sex. He argues that whenever courtship is over and "lovers must come face to face in a moment of love," Austen withdraws to a distance. She describes Emma's reaction to George Knightley's proposal of marriage with a little joke, and does not include a detailed description of Elizabeth Bennet's response to Darcy's second proposal of marriage. pp. 30-31.

• "[T]he bourgeois world is her world—and, more particularly, courtship and marriage are her province—because nowhere else, in books or in life, can she find such guarantees of distance, such durable incongruities between form and fact, between moral pretension and material reality, upon which to exercise and fulfill her irony. Irony, beginning as a defensive restriction of outlook, becomes the organizing principal of her art." p. 31.

• "The Three Sisters illuminates the conventions of courtship and marriage with a completeness of candor, truth and irony unparalleled even in Jane Austen's own later work." 31. Her intention in TTS was to expose the materialist personality beneath the screen of moral pretension. Her ironic device is to grant the materialist personality "an uninhibited articulateness" and to demonstrate its incongruity with the conventional mode of thought about courtship and marriage. The male suitor (Mr. Watts) is open and honest in expressing his (to the modern eye realistic) views of marriage, and the "heroine" Mary offends her sisters not because she despises her future husband but because she expresses it openly to those outside her immediate family. 31-34.

• Austen's admirers praise her mildness and generosity of tone, and her critical detractors complain about her triviality, lack of passion, vulgarity or quaintness. Both miss the dynamics of her personality: in her fiction, Austen keeps her distance and makes no final personal choice among the various alternatives she portrays; she is a spectator who maintains her detachment and shys away from emotion. "[C]lose observation without sympathy, common sense without tenderness, densely imagined representation without passion....far from limiting her to a Burneyan reflection of manners, can reconstitute the whole cold, anxious atmosphere in which the middle class lives and breathes." 36.

Chapter Two: The Literary Pretext Continued: Irony Versus Gothicism (Northanger Abbey)

• Austen found herself "altogether and immediately at home" in the novel. Her characteristic irony doesn't explain her choice of genre. Austen had special talents for the novel which surfaced precociously in the Juvenilia. Her special talent for thematic narrative is obvious in Love and Freindship and in The Three Sisters; the latter work and Lesley Castle are early evidence of her talent for recasting and organizing personality in potential depth and development. 37.

• For several year after Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho was published in 1794, Austen avoided her earlier inclinations toward simple parody and focused instead on the manuscripts of Elinor and Marianne and First Impressions. Meanwhile, the Gothic fad reached its height, and Austen the ironist could no longer resist "having a go" at it. The result in Northanger Abbey is a novel that juxtaposes ironically the bourgeois world of her other novels and the world of the Gothic novel, which are made to comment on each other. "The ironic contrast, the juxtaposition of these two sets of values is, in fact, so overt and extensive that the formal unity of the novel depends on the author's success in maintaining each one as a distinct, continuous, and self-consistent commentary on the other." 38-39. "Instead of reproducing the Gothic types of character and situation, she presents their anti-types in the actual world, and organizes these into a domestic narrative that parallels or intersects, and at all times is intended to invalidate, the Gothic narrative to which it diligently corresponds." 39.

• Austen was not interested in the strain of Gothic represented by Lewis's The Monk ("stagey sensuality and diabolism") but rather the hybrid strain derived from the lachrymose novel and developed to its height by Mrs. Radcliffe. 39-40. "In these novels, sensibility is still the index of virtue and the motive of action. The difference is that mere extravagances of pathos, poverty, suffering and parental misunderstanding are replaced by strangeness and terror — a change of atmosphere rather than of character or motive. For the reader, the only difference is that the gasp replaces the tear as the measurable unit of response." 40.

• "Jane Austen never lets us doubt her dual intention in the narrative. She places before us both what a character should be if he were to conform to the Gothic mode, and what he really is." 42. Mrs. Allen, for example, fills the role of Gothic chaperone, but Austen makes clear in her description that Mrs. Allen is anything but - "she is neither wicked nor vigilant." 42-43.

• Henry Tilney's function in the novel is as a stand-in for the author, "to provide a non-committal running ironic commentary on the hypocrisy of social conventions and the incredibility of the literary conventions that parallel them." 43. Tilney is the chief observer and interpreter of both levels of the story, the Gothic romance and the lachrymose novel. Tilney's worldliness and lack of sentimentality are expressed through irony. 43.

• Northanger Abbey is both a "realistic" novel and a parody of Gothic novels. Catherine Morland is not simply "an hallucinated puppet but a credibly impressionable and ingenuous young girl, with enough common sense to require at least a show of evidence before she draws the Gothic conclusions." 45-46.

• "For all the malice, hypocrisy, treachery, and general wickedness at Udolpho, Jane Austen finds very satisfactory counterparts at Bath. What her irony does here, as elsewhere, is to diminish scale, to puncture the grandiose pretensions of the Gothic villains, to demonstrate what villainy is like when transferred to the everyday, middle class social world." Austen juxtaposes the Gothic types and the anti-type characters "actually" found at Bath. "The ironist finds no iniquity at Bath, but there is enough contemptibleness and to spare." 46. Many of the characters in the novel suggest the corresponding Gothic types by being so different from them, by displaying their qualities reversed. Mrs. Allen is the opposite of the Gothic chaperone, Isabella is the opposite of the Gothic heroine's confidante, Henry Tilney is the Gothic hero reversed. 46-48.

• Henry Tilney is the only perceptive person in the book. "[H]e closely resembles, except for a few details of dress and appearance, the author herself....Henry is constitutionally incapable of making a statement unqualified by irony." 48. "Henry Tilney is the willfully ironic and detatched spectator as no one except the author herself is in any other of Jane Austen's novels." 49. As a character, Tilney helps to unify the novel by connecting the two worlds Austen describes (Austen's "dual intention") and allows Austen to comment without seeming too intrusive. 49-50.

• Mudrick feels that Austen was ultimately unsuccessful, that due to her inexperience Austen leaves the reader feeling that she intrudes into the story at the expense of the personal depth and independence of her characters. 50-51. Mudrick also criticizes Austen's compulsion toward irony. In Northanger Abbey, Austen's continual use of irony is too heavy-handed ("always somewhat excessive for its material"). It leaves the reader unable to identify sympathetically with Catherine's "plight" and ultimately keeps her from being a fully rounded person. "To the other characters, Jane Austen denies even a suspicion of depth." They are defined ironically as they are introduced and are allowed to behave subsequently only within the initial ironic definition. 51-54. Mudrick believes that the development and resolution of the story are arbitrary and flimsy as a result.

Chapter Three: The Literary Pretext Concluded: Irony and Convention Versus Feeling (Sense and Sensibility)

• Austen continues to use parody in S & S, in a more restricted way than in her earlier work. "[I]t seems the last embedded relic of her earlier style, an incongruous survival...." 60. Austen's parody centers on the novel of sensibility, an earlier target, but now it is limited by the author's open disapproval. "The object of parody must now be explicitly condemned before we may observe it in action." 60. After discussing several examples, Mudrick argues that parody has always been Austen's first resort in reacting to feeling, in order to maintain distance, and she continues to use it for this purpose. The difference is that now Austen yields to social convention "and assures her readers that feeling — at least an excess of it — is not merely amusing, but morally wrong." 60-61.

• In portraying Marianne, Austen's irony moves away from parody and toward the individual, "toward the question of personal decision and personal value....Marianne makes her own decisions and has her own value. She is no cardboard cutout....her difficulties arise a youthful and inexperienced, a bold but incomplete awareness." 63. Mudrick feels that Marianne is in this not very different from Elizabeth Bennet. The central problem of S & S, according to Mudrick, is the interpretation of personality, distinguishing substance from plausibility. 63.

• The Middletons, the Palmers and John and Fanny Dashwood "collectively represent Marianne's great enemy, the cold unconscious final indignity of prudent middle-class marriage." 68. What Mudrick calls "the community of mean minds" organizes itself spontaneously, and Marianne's mother and sometimes even Elinor accomodate themselves to it. 71.

• At the point in the story where Lucy "confides" in Elinor, Elinor remains calm and courteous but works hard to obtain from Lucy the information about Edward she wants. Mudrick points out that here Elinor adopts Lucy's principal tactical stance - dissimulation - and does so with the author's evident and unironic approval. "This, then, is approved behavior, this is sense as it shows itself superior to sensibility." At this point, the views of te author and of the reader begin to diverge. 74.

• Marianne can recognize only two types of people, the worthy, who are honest and sensitive, and the unworthy, who are dishonest and insensitive. This rigid distinction causes Marianne to misjudge various characters, including most importantly Mrs. Jennings - she has no sensibility but proves herself a friend in the crisis of Marianne's illness - Colonel Brandon and Willoughby. 74-82. Marianne's sensibility was not responsible for her misjudgment of Willoughby, however. Instead, it allowed her to perceive the part of Willoughby worth knowing, the part also understood and remembered wistfully by Elinor after her final interview with him. Elinor's final reaction to Willoughby is contradictory. 82-84. "[A]s surely as we are intended to condemn Willoughby after his disclosure [to Elinor], we must nevertheless at this very point observe Elinor—and presumably the author—almost in love, and quite amorally in love, with him....through the flagrant inconsistency of her heroine Jane Austen is herself revealed in a posture of yearning for the impossible and lost, the passionate and beautiful hero, the absolute lover." 85.

• Mudrick doesn't like Edward Ferrars or Colonel Brandon much. Their function in the plot is as exemplars of "good form" and antidotes to feeling. Feeling is bad because it is a personal commitment Austen wished to avoid, and irony and social forms are good because they enable one to remain detached, uncommitted. Social convention here joins (and eventually supersedes) irony as Austen's principal defense against feeling. If Marianne represents a depth of Austen's own feelings, it is a depth quickly suppressed through the use of these tools. 85-91.

Chapter Four: Irony as Discrimination (Pride and Prejudice)

• In P & P, Elizabeth Bennet shares the author's own characteristic response to the world, that of the ironic spectator. Elizabeth is a "studier of character" who divides the world of people into two categories, the simple ones (Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins, Lydia Bennet, Bingley) and the intricate ones who cannot be judged and classified so easily (Darcy of course but also Wickham and Charlotte Lucas). This is the first judgment that must be made about everyone, not a moral judgment but a psychological one. 94-95. Mudrick engages in a long discussion of the various "simple" characters and sums up by stating that these characters are "powerless" to affect the central, more complex ones and also that Elizabeth's ironic judgments of these characters are always correct. 95-106.

• When Elizabeth has to consider more "intricate" personalities, her youth, inexperience and personal involvement (as opposed to the detachment of Henry Tilney) begin to deceive her. Elizabeth knows well the personality and character of her friend Charlotte Lucas, but fails to understand the overwhelming strength of the social pressures acting upon her and therefore is shocked by Charlotte's acceptance of Mr. Collin's proposal. In fact, this is symptomatic of a continuing mistake Elizabeth makes, that of ignoring social context, the acquisitive society in which all of the characters live. 107-109. Wickham is smooth, clever and charming, but also a dispossessed man, a fact Elizabeth ignores to her cost. 110.

• Mudrick feels that Austen's irony fails in dealing with extra-marital sex. Austen is unable to be ironic about sexual experience, and her only remaining response is conventional, as evidenced by her continuing disapproval of Lydia's behavior. 111-113.

• Something similar goes on with her portrayal of Darcy. For all of his importance to the plot, Darcy's is not a fully realized character. Except at certain points in his repartee with Elizabeth, he seems made of cardboard. In the interest of the plot, his behavior is inconsistent with his character and principles: a man of propriety and dignity, he makes a vulgar unflattering comment about Elizabeth within her hearing; a man of great reserve, he follows up his rejected proposal with an open and candid letter to Elizabeth describing intensely personal matters. 116-120. "The reason seems to be the same as that which compelled Jane Austen to falsify her tone and commentary concerning Wickham's seductions and to supply Elinor and Marianne with such nonentities for husbands. The socially unmanageable, the personally involving aspects of sex, Jane Austen can no longer treat with irony, not can she yet treat them straightforwardly." 117.

• Mudrick returns to the theme of powerlessness and choice. Only the intricate characters have the ability to make choices and even they find that choices are never unalloyed and may disappear altogether. The simple people do not choose at all; they live the illusion of choice. Elizabeth retains the power of choice, in spite of the constraints of social pressure. 123-125.

• Mudrick seems to approve of the idea, first advanced by Q. D. Leavis, that P & P was an effort by Austen to rewrite Cecilia in realistic terms, and that this can account in part for Darcy's peculiar flatness as a character - he was borrowed. 117, 125.

Chapter Five: Gentility: Ironic Vision and Conventional Revision (Lady Susan and The Watsons)

• Mudrick describes Lady Susan as "uniquely characteristic of its author." 127. It displays clearly for the only time "that complex of hard, avoidable social facts which is always at the center of her awareness" but which in her other work propriety compels her to represent only indirectly, if at all. 127. The facts are in the description of Lady Susan by her enemies and dupes and by herself. 127. Those facts consist of Lady Susan's beauty and guile, her principal weapons, but more importantly in her social status as a lady of rank. She has only to observe the rules of propriety, to display her emotions only in accepted modes and circumstances, to maintain her social reputation, in order to prevail over her enemies and those of whom she wishes to take advantage. 135-136. "All these social facts are in Lady Susan's favor, and she profits brilliantly by them. Her motives are wicked but her manners are impeccable, sentiment masks her feeling and propriety her character..." 137. Ironically, she prevails over others (Mrs. Vernon) because in a society in which manners, sentiment and propriety matter and motives, true feelings and character do not matter, "the individual exists to use and be used, not to know and be known." 136-137. There is another, deeper level of irony here. Lady Susan is almost effortless triumphant in her social world, but in the end abandons her various schemes to marry Sir James Martin, because the social world in which she exists is too small to give proper room for the exercise of her talents. "The world defeats Lady Susan, not because it recognizes her vices, but because her virtues have no room in it." 137.

• Lady Susan is, Mudrick believes, "a quintessence of Jane Austen's most characteristic qualities and interests" and her first completed masterpiece. 138. It is a culmination of the work of Austen's early period. It distills the "glittering, analytic, detached, but rather rambling and literary irony" of the Juvenilia and Northanger Abbey, it is explicit about the social facts dealt with largely indirectly in Pride and Prejudice, and its main character easily matches the John Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility. It is of course unpolished and unfinished, not having had the benefit of extensive revisions by the author. 139. Mudrick believes it likely that a work "as ruthlessly and exuberantly sardonic" as this was written largely before the beginning of Austen's "fallow" period from 1801 to 1809. 140. He believes that a comparison with The Watsons, known to have been written during this period, supports his belief. 140.

• The Watsons lacks important qualities found in Austen's other works. It lacks exuberance and therefore "has no momentum, no lift that carries the reader beyond the necessarily limited setting." 140-141. Austen treats some of her characters with total solemnity, and others with a mild irony different from her other work. 141, 145. Mudrick believes that Austen's use of irony here is so limited (and limiting) because her attention is totally focussed on something else: husband-hunting, a topic she chooses to treat moralistically and not ironically. 145. "[I]t is of course in some respects always Jane Austen's engrossing subject: but in The Watsons, alone, she confronts it directly and with a determined solemnity, effectively shields it, at every crucial point, from irony." 145.

• The prevailing tone of the work is solemn and severely moral. Irony is used sparingly only to set off the new tone. "Husband-hunting has become an unironic evil opposed by an equally unironic morality, a morality, that is, embodied in an inner circle of characters untouched by irony: Emma and her father, Mr. Howard and his sister, Mrs. Blake." 147.

• Mr. Howard, intended by the author to be Emma Watson's husband, is significantly Jane Austen's first "serious" clergyman, after Henry Tilney ("Bumptious young man of the world") and Mr. Collins. He is personable, gentlemanly, independent, and socially accepted as an equal in the highest circles. 139-140. "Most interesting and central of all is the fact that Mr. Howard is presented, with much approval, as Jane Austen's first practicing clergyman." 149. His skills as a preacher exactly match Emma's father's tastes. Mudrick identifies "his chief value, which, to Emma and the story, will be as the worthy clergyman, the dignified professional moralist, to whom Emma may turn after after grandly rejecting the immoral social pressures toward a marriage of convenience." 150.

• "Elizabeth Bennet had to learn through hard experience–this is, indeed, one way of stating the theme of Pride and Prejudice–that the anti-personal pressures of a materialistic society are strong and varied enough to overcome, not only those, like Mr. Collins, who have no personality to lose, but forceful, intelligent men like her father and sensible girls like Charlotte Lucas. Emma, on the other hand, remains totally unaware of any difficulty." Those characters who have the power to choose always make the correct moral choice without apparent difficulty. 152.

• "In The Watsons, Jane Austen has for the first time immersed herself wholly in the grim business of vindicating genteel morality against the very society it is organized to uphold." 153. Austen is so committed to the moral issues that she appears to lose interest in the characters and relationships that form the basis for her story. "The stiff protesting moralist who first appeared . . . in Elinor Dashwood's self-justifications is here in full control." 153. Austen abandoned the story fragment, presumably recognizing that the "black and White" pattern around which the story was constructed couldn't succeed. 153-154. However, "the accumulating genteel imperatives that obliged her to produce it" returned and triumphed in Mansfield Park. 154.

Chapter Six: The Triumph of Gentility (Mansfield Park)

• Marvin Mudrick doesn't like Mansfield Park. He views it as a kind of turning point in Austen's work. In her prior work, everything was subject to what Mudrick calls Austen's "complicating irony". In MP, irony is virtually absent. "The thesis of Mansfield Park is severely moral: that one world, representing the genteel orthodoxy of Jane Austen's time, is categorically superior to any other. Nowhere else does Jane Austen take such pains to make up the mind of her reader. . . . To the thesis, everything else gives way: in the end, it subordinates or destroys every character; the function of the heroine is to ensure its full acceptance. Fanny Price is not simply the author's heroine, but the example and proof of her thesis." 155.

• As a character, Fanny Price exists to be the only point of contact with all of the worlds of the novel: "proletarian Portsmouth, fashionable London, and Mansfield Park". 155. Mudrick makes the point that Austen's prior work centered on personal choices, whether real or illusory, which characters are free to make or not. In Mansfield Park, Fanny's choices are not simply personal among discrete actions but are choices of fundamental allegiance to one world or another; "the action of the novel is a collision of worlds." 155-156.

• Marvin Mudrick doesn't like Fanny Price, either. Fanny is naive by force of circumstance, but "naturally" proper by intuition. "She has an insight into the moral premises of everyone she meets; and we must infer that naïveté, far from limiting her vision, serves her as an open window to conscience, her own and everyone else's." 156. Throughout the episode of the theatrical, Mudrick feels no sympathy or even pity for Fanny. "She is always so careful, so exact in points of conscience, that our sympathy has no object. The author arms her with righteousness, and she must prevail." 160. "We never take the author's word for Fanny. The surface is there: humility, shyness, unfailing moral vision; but behind them we feel something persistently unpleasant—complacency and envy, perhaps; certainly an odd lackluster self-pity. . . ." 161.

• Mudrick then moves to a seven page riff on Mary Crawford, making a comparison with Fanny Price and coming down in every particular in Mary's corner. Mary is poised, witty and charming, at ease among men and women both, a woman of the urban world, "free to introduce her own liveliness into any company." 161. Fanny is of course the opposite as a result of her own temperament and upbringing. Fanny is described as loving nature (an echo of Cowper) in contrast with Mary, whose attention "was all for men and women". 162. Mudrick is not impressed: to him, Fanny's expressed interest in nature seems flat and false and cries out for (but doesn't elicit) Austen's accustomed irony, while Mary's detailed and immediate attention to everyone she meets is admirable. Mary is cynical and unkind on one subject only, and that is authority, whether that of the military hierarchy (represented by her uncle the admiral) or established religion. 162-163.

  "The contrast between Fanny and Mary has a sexual ground, which the author herself recognizes and brings forward. Mary appears throughout as a high-spirited girl with a free tongue and a free mind, and one plain implication is that she has her own free, high-spirited ideas about sex. . . She casually defends marriage for money and convenience; but falls in love with Edmund, apparently for his personal qualities alone, since he has no money, and since she is deprived even of the satisfaction of sharing his principles." 164.

  Mary Crawford is supposed to represent something clearly to be deplored, but almost against the author's will, she comes off as very attractive on many levels. If Mary is skeptical of authority and convention, a tart and funny commentator on the people who surround her, she is no more so than Jane Austen was herself, as revealed by her letters. 169-170.

  "In Mansfield Park Jane Austen proposes a conflict of worlds, and restricts the will of the individual to a choice among worlds. This is her plan, and Fanny fits it smoothly; but Mary keeps escaping. By mere force of personality, in fact, Mary Crawford threatens to overthrow the plan. . . .Lacking other means, the author betrays Mary, as an author must always betray a character outgrowing the canvass, eluding the moral situation." 165.

  Mainly, Austen effects this betrayal through Fanny's reactions to Mary. "Fanny can hardly endure her presence: she maliciously interprets every gesture and remark, savagely blackens every motive that Mary exposes or implies." 166. The attempt is so extreme as to lose all credibility. 167.

• Henry Crawford is a less admirable figure, in his trifling with Maria and Julia, but when he begins to be interested in Fanny his many fine qualities become apparent. Austen mistreats Henry as a character as well, and equally unconvincingly: after carefully describing Henry's open, tender and tactful courtship of Fanny, the author has him abruptly run off with Maria Bertram (in an action an actor might well describe as unmotivated).

• This mistreatment is necessary in order for Austen to be able to make her story work out "correctly." However, Jane Austen is in the position of "attacking much of herself in the image of Mary Crawford: the attack is on the most earnest ethical grounds, and fixes the tone of the novel; and the consequence of the attack is an aesthetic failure." 170.

• Whatever Austen's personality, she lived "her entire life within a deeply conformist and self-complacent society." Insularity was the most prominent characteristic, and submission to doctrine the key virtue, of this world. 170-171. Mudrick believes that Austen had to have been influenced "by the religion and social structure that she accepted as true and enduring, by the people she lived with and wrote for." 171. Under such social and personal pressures, "it is easy to believe that Jane Austen felt obliged to produce a work of uncompromising moral purpose, whatever the bent of her taste and imagination." 172.

• The absence of authorial irony in MP is notable. As technique, irony was particularly adapted to Jane Austen's need to maintain her distance and avoid commitment. In MP, however, the very nature of the issues demanded commitment. The Crawfords are the only characters in MP who habitually use irony. Against the brilliance of the Crawfords, Austen could sustain Fanny and Edward only by convincing readers of their honesty and depth of feeling. Because Austen was unwilling to come close to them, she could not endow them with the personal warmth, the tenderness that might have convinced readers to prefer them over the Crawfords. 178-179. "Whatever life Fanny and Edmund begin with ebbs away in priggishness and self-satisfaction, toward a norm of orthodox nonentity. . . . What imagination will not quail before the thought of a Saturday night at the Edmund Bertrams, after the prayer-books have been put away." 179. MP fails to convince because Jane Austen has abandoned irony, her only spontaneous response to the "inflexible and deadening moral dogma" the novel upholds. 180.

Chapter Seven: Irony as Form (Emma)

• For Mudrick, Emma is different from what went before. "The author and her characters move with a freedom and assurance unparalelled in Jane Austen's earlier work...." 181. "[T]he impetus is irony. In Emma, the sense of strain and anxiety is purged altogether." 181.

• Like Pride and Prejudice, Emma is a story of self-deception and the problem of each heroine is to undeceive herself. However, the basis of Elizabeth Bennet's self-deception is factual; upon learning new facts (e.g., the visit to Pemberley and the viewpoint of Darcy's housekeeper), she can perceive clearly. Emma's self-deception is based on her personality. Emma likes to be in charge, to manage things and the lives of other people, to be in the center of things, to dominate. Her strong personality can be checked and guided only by a personality as positive as her own. Except for Knightley, there is no one in her immediate circle capable of this. 182-184, 187. Emma prefers the company of women she can master and direct; "this preference is intrinsic to her whole dominating and uncommitting personality....Emma needs to dominate, she can of course—in her class and time—most easily dominate women; and her need is urgent enough to forego even the pretense of sympathetic understanding. She feels affection only towards Harriet, Mrs. Weston, and her father: instances, not of tenderness, but rather of satisfied control." 192.

• Mudrick identifies Emma's great flaw as a lack of tenderness. 193. "Emma is moved to play God, but without tenderness or social caution (or the artist's awareness) she falls into every conceivable mistake and misjudgment....Without tenderness or caution, she makes the worst of every situation: imagines evil where there is good—because Jane Fairfax is "disgustingly reserved" or has "odious composure"—and good where there is nothing but an extension of self." 194. "Emma plays God because she cannot commit herself humanly....For Emma, there is no communication of feeling. She can esteem, loath, praise, censure, grieve, rejoice—but she cannot feel like anyone else in the world. Her ego will admit noting but itself." 200.

• Frank Churchill is the only character in the book who sees Emma clearly. He is as egotistical and calculating as she is, but he "beats her at her own game" because he is much less self-deluded. Compared to Emma, Frank is much more experienced, and experience with his tyrannical aunt has taught him to be cautious, and to disguise his egotism with charm." 197. Frank is unscrupulous because he needs no scruples, his charm and wealth excuse all. 199.

• The large irony of this novel is the deceptiveness of surface. Charm is a warning signal, warning of wit unconnected to feeling. Elizabeth Bennet is the only one of Austen's heroines who can be described as charming, and her charm is counterbalanced by intelligence, consideration of others, good intentions. "The other heroines—Elinor Dashwood, Catherine Morland, Fanny Price, Anne Elliott—are presented in the quietest colors." The charming characters—Willoughby, Mary Crawford, Wickham, Frank Churchill—always betray. In Emma, Emma herself and Frank Churchill have "the benefit of every alluring quality": beauty, wealth, position; but the results of their efforts are confusion and unhappiness. 201.

• Mudrick believes that Emma is distinguishable from all of Austen's other work because of its workmanship, what he describes as its "multiplicity and sureness of reference" and "the "manifold complexity of the book's web . . . every sentence, almost every epithet, has it definite reference to equally unemphasized points before and after it in the development of the plot." 202. Nothing is surplus, "every word, every action, and every response of Emma's establish her nature, confirm her self-deception, and prepare for her downfall. The ironic reverberations . . . reinforce one another in a structure whose apparent lightness is less remarkable only than its compact and powerful density." 202-203.

• At first, what is obvious about Emma's relationship with Harriet is Emma's urge to dominate her friend. Later, it becomes apparent that Emma has created in Harriet a kind of proxy—Harriet must be married so that Emma, who does not wish to commit herself to marriage, can discover what marriage is like. Emma is so upset by Mr. Elton's proposal not only because he has misunderstood Emma's efforts to match him with Harriet but because Elton has by-passed the buffer against commitment Harriet was supposed to provide. Moreover, Mudrick believes that Emma's interest in Harriet is not simply that of master and pupil, but seriously emotional. However socially and personally unacceptable, Emma is in love with Harriet, but cannot commit to this emotional reality either. "[W]e return always to Emma's overpowering motive: her fear of commitment." 203.

• Emma comes to understand that she and Frank Churchill are very lucky in the irony that finds them a George Knightley and a Jane Fairfax to sober and direct them and keep them honest. Their good fortune derives from the fact that "in their social milieu charm conquers, even as it makes every cruel and thoughtless mistake; because, existing apart from and inevitably denying emotion and commitment, it nevertheless finds committed to it even the good and the wise...." 206.

Chapter Eight: The Liberation of Feeling (Persuasion)

• In Persuasion, Jane Austen exhibits a kind of compulsive exasperation with some of her characters whenever they fail, for whatever reason, to advance the interests of Anne Elliott. The principal "victim" of this sharp personal edge is Sir Walter Elliott, but it also affects her portrayal of Elizabeth Elliot, Mrs. Clay, and Mrs, Musgrove and her dead son Dick. "Of these, not only does she tell us what to think; she seems to resent even the creative effort by which she must embody [them] before she can impale them." 207.

  The fact is that Sir Walter pains Jane Austen, that Mrs. Musgrove and Dick Musgrove and Elizabeth Elliot and Mrs. Clay pain her by their very existence, that she recoils continually from the touch of them, as if they are too close and too present, not images but flesh; and she can end only by treating them, not with irony, with illustrative incident, with perspective of any sort, but with sarcasm, abuse, or silence. 216.

  Mudrick views this exasperation as significant. In part, it derives from the fact that Austen did not have the chance, because of her illness and death, to revise Persuasion as carefully as she revised and reworked her earlier published novels. More importantly, the exasperation evidences a personal commitment on Austen's part, personal feelings, that she did not permit herself in the earlier works. 216-218.

  Jane Austen's old need for detachment is gone; and if she is sensitive to the point of vexation and haste in her treatment of villains, she is also, for the first time, sensitive to the point of detailed and sympathetic analysis in her treatment of heroes and heroines. 218.

• Austen places Sir Walter and Mrs. Clay together unchaperoned in Bath, as if she intended to describe a seduction. She does not do so, however; Mrs. Clay disappears from the narrative until William Elliot steps in to "claim" her. Why does Austen omit the obvious seduction scene? Partly, this is due to "her tendency to omit or distort situations artistically sound but ethically abhorrent to her age". 215. But Austen did treat seduction in situations where it could be treated comically but did not have to be "actual and achieved" (Emma's speculations on Jane Fairfax's supposed but unreal seduction) or where it could be unambiguously disapproved (Mansfield Park). The most important answer to this puzzle is Austen's exasperation with the characters involved, described above. Austen does not want to spend more time with these two. 215-216.

• Anne is a different kind of heroine. Elinor is essentially a by-stander, Catherine and Fanny appear in novels where the viewpoint is the author's and not their own, Elizabeth and Emma's viewpoints are shown but in the end prove to be prejudiced, capricious, deluded or wholly false. Only Anne Elliot "sees clearly, without caprice; and even the author's obvious partiality toward her serves only to provide space and light for a mind richly responsive to both." 218-219. There is therefore a discontinuity between the portrayal of Anne and the portrayal of the characters Austen apparently dislikes. Those unfavored characters are not seen as Anne sees them, but as Austen feels about them, and Mudrick believes this to be a "failure of technique and a misdirection of feeling." 219.

• Anne Elliot is the first of Austen's heroines to take a detailed and disinterested pleasure in sensory impressions, in the beauty of autumn, in the "romantic" attraction of Lyme. This evidences the opening of parts of Austen's mind that have been shut before. "[T]he world is enlarging—with some loss of hard, sharp contour initially, but with a great potential (and often realized) gain in variety and power." 223-224.

• In Persuasion for the first time, Austen does not elide the description of love. Elizabeth Bennet makes a joke of falling in love with Pemberley, Emma's declaration of love is summarized obliquely ("What did she say? Just what a lady ought."), there is nothing even this indirect in Mansfield Park between Fanny and Edmund. Anne Elliot is not permitted to speak aloud her love for Wentworth, but there is for the first time a substantial (third person) description of her feelings and of their conversation. 227-228.

• Mudrick discusses in detail prior criticism by Mary Lascelles and Mark Schorer, which he identifies as the only prior serious criticism of the novel. 228-240. Schorer describes Persuasion as a novel about courtship and marriage in the "bourgeois" [anachronistic term, required I suppose by Marxist criticism] marriage market, showing women as a commodity and in which the basis for comedy is the difference between two orders of value, the moral (to which people pay lip service) and the material (to which people actually pay attention). Comedy arises when the principal characters act according to this dichotomy but remain unaware of it, as Schorer believes Anne and Wentworth do. 229-230. Mudrick rejects this idea. Anne and Wentworth are continually aware of both the necessary material basis for marriage (the absence of which led to their rupture eight years before) and the need for emotional attachment. (Anne's strong feelings for Wentworth are never in doubt, but her major uncertainty is whether her actions eight years before have destroyed Wentworth's feelings of love for her, and Wentworth himself is not sure what Anne's present feelings are.) 230.

  Anne and Wentworth neither overlook nor rebel against the material base of their society....Their problem—and they are both wholly aware of it, is to determine just how far the claim of feeling can yield, without effacing itself altogether, to the claim of economics; and this central problem of is not comic. 231.

  Schorer's article is important not because his analysis is correct but because he points out the fundamental role played in the story by economic anxiety. 231.

• Mudrick believes that the problem Anne and Wentworth face is a personal version of Mudrick's familiar "conflict between worlds". This conflict, embodied within Anne herself, is between the feudal remnant, conscious of and focused on tradition, and the rising middle class, conscious of its vitality. Anne is in the center of this conflict, between Sir Walter and William Elliot, Lady Russell and Wentworth, Mary Musgrove and her husband. 231-232.

  Only Anne observes, from its center, the whole history of the conflict that divides into two camps all of the major characters of the book except herself; and her decision—which she made before the story begins—is that both sides are wrong....Throughout the book, she is caught in the center of a struggle whose issues—precedence, power, money, property—are hateful to her as issues, among people who pursue material goals in a wreckage of personality; and she will remain caught, forever, because she is a woman and unmarried in a society which maintains unmarried women on sufferance, because she has nowhere to go and nothing to say—unless the lover...whom she rejected in ignorance of his momentous distinction from the others, comes back to claim her. 236.

  "The interest of the story is to illustrate the plight of a sensitive woman in a society which has a measure for everything except sensitivity." 239.

• We cannot know what Persuasion would have been like if Austen had lived to revise it and put it into its final form. As it is, it marks a major change in Austen's work. Austen is closely attentive for the first time to personal feelings and to economic tensions. Most notable, she has abandoned "the shield of irony" and the "shield of casuistry" (as in Mansfield Park). She continues to use irony but in a more controlled and uncompulsive way. Austen's universe is expanding "to include many things undreamed of—or just dreamed of—in her youth." "If Persuasion...is a partial failure as a work of art, it is an astonishingly new and sure direction in a great novelist, toward a door that Jane Austen lived only long enough to set ajar." 240.

Chapter Nine: The Liberation of Irony (Sanditon)

• Charlotte Heywood's is the viewpoint from which almost all of this story is told. Unlike earlier heroines, Charlotte sees things as they are. She is intelligent, perceptive, psychologically acute, and as an outsider, neutral. There are two instances in Sanditon in which Charlotte is not the viewpoint character. First is the opening scene: for the first time, Austen begins "with anonymity and action rather than with names, ancestries, and a careful accounting of material circumstances". 242. The second is the only instance of direct authorial comment: after Sir Edward Denham describes for Charlotte his taste in novels, the author steps in to explain that Sir Edward intends to seduce Clara Brereton. The passage is quite funny and represents a breakthrough for Austen—she violates the rule she previously followed that actual seduction or the planning of seduction must never be represented comically. 242-245.

  [I]t remains notable [they're playing my word] as the latest large sign of personal liberation, of the full release of powers—a release presaged by the intense fulfillment of Emma, and in a very different manner already signaled in the expanding world of Persuasion. 245.

• Sex as comedy is one of three new ingredients in Sanditon. The other two are the romantic poets (Sir Edward is famously and fatuously full of them) and topography, that is, the town of Sanditon itself. Mudrick describes Sanditon as a comedy of ambiguity which depends on the ambiguities inherent in an unsettled setting among unromantic people, inherent in the relationships between the wealthy and those who might (or would like to) inherit from them, and "inherent also in the diverging personal pressures and social responsibilities of sex upon men and women in a society in which sex has become the ultimate, polarly remote, invisible stage of a narrow, a convention-hedged and convention-trapped road." 256-257.

• Sanditon represents a new stage in Jane Austen's personal growth as an author, a stage undertaken as Austen was dying. Austen's irony is renewed and, at least potentially, no longer inhibited. Her irony is dynamic, changing or expanding into an authentically unrestricted point of view, into a free and undefensive agent of perception. 257.

Page

Page—The Language of Jane Austen

Editorial note: This book has a lot of detail regarding the individual novels (what a shock!); again, it would be good for the individual novel pages. Editorial note: The precision of Page's analysis is incredibly difficult to convey here. There are charts and graphs and diagrams and endless detailed examples...

1: Style in Jane Austen's Novels

• "the early novels in particular are to a striking extent about language, in that they use and abuse of words is a frequently recurring theme" (12-13)
• Austen's "keen sense of the absurd [in the juvenilia] encourages a linguistic adventurousness that was to be very largely suppressed in the more fundamentally serious productions of later years, in which her awareness of the comic possibilities of language finds an outlet mainly in the speech of the foolish and the vulgar." (14)
• "The use of ambiguity in different forms...is a marked feature of the style of Northanger Abbey" as is the satire of the Gothic (19).
• "Precision, and the lack of it, in using language are also among the recurring themes of Sense and Sensibility" (20); "careless use of language" is a "sign of moral confusion" (22).
• In P&P, dialogues and letters are important (31).
• JA wrote that the theme of MP was "ordination" (34) in a letter.
• MP is different in style and tone that JA's other novels - more serious and less ironic (35).
• "Fanny's strongest feelings do not find utterance" (37).
• Austen's novels operate on "key-words"; "comfort" is one such keyword in MP. "Fanny is not concerned to challenge society or to shape the destinies of others. She is above all anxious to achieve a state of emotional security where, within circumscribed limits, she may feel at ease." (41) - That is why the word and versions of it appear around 70 or 80 times.
• Persuasion: "There is less wit and epigrammatism, less delight in individual and eccentric modes of speech, less dialogue in which characters find relish in conversation as a stimulating and delightful social activity. Instead, we encounter a style in which narrative, comment, dialogue (presented in various ways) and interior monologue very frequently and unobtrusively merge into one another." (49)

2: 'The Best Chosen Language'

• There is a "conspicuous absence of words referring to physical perception, the world of shape and colour and sensuous response" and a "recurrence of a relatively small number of frequently-used words, mainly epithets and abstract nouns indicating personal qualities—qualities, that is, of character and temperament rather than outward appearance. Most of these words seem to express the standards she deems desirable in human conduct and social relationships" (54-55)

• "the material solidity and circumstantiality of this world is something that she has relatively little interest in rendering: there is in her novels almost one of the minute description of externals—people and their dress, houses and furniture and landscapes—that is such an important element in creating the fictional worlds of Dickens and George Eliot and Hardy. We know Emma, for instance, intimately as a mind" (56-57)
• "The deliberate playing-down of the surface of life is her way of relating the localized and limited world of the novel to those wider issues of conduct which are, for her, all-important, and which alone justify the claim of the novel to be taken seriously. Attention is focused, therefore, upon speech and action, and the analysis of their implications, rather than upon costume and scenery; and stylistically this tendency is manifested in her preference for the abstract noun" (59; 87)

• Austen writes in "key-words": ex: taste, judgment, amiable, respectable (55); Page lists over 45 (76); also: benevolence, candour, temper, delicacy, firmness, integrity, principle, rectitude, resolution, self-command, steadiness (76)

• "Some of the appearances of a single world in one of the novels may serve to illustrate in miniature the use of these terms to indicate, with sureness and precision, the social and moral standards deemed desirable. The notion of 'elegance' occurs often in Emma." (64) - Emma, Jane Fairfax, Mrs. Elton, and others are described as elegant, but all in order to differentiate what kind of elegance is desired (65)

• "A very important element in her vocabulary, then, is the result of a wish to make everyday words convey an exact and substantial meaning: she uses amiable or elegant, taste or prudence, with the same attention to their proper significance that makes her reject the vagueness and imprecision of colloquial and 'low' language. A familiar word can thus carry unusual weight; and normally she has no need of emphatic language to make her points cogently. Her habitual tone is quiet, avoiding declamation and rhetoric" (79)

3: 'Vision in Action': a Note on Syntax

• Syntactic structures look back to Johnson's Rasselas the The Rambler and forward to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (91).
• eighteenth-century inheritances: anthitheses, inversion, three-part structure (93)

• antithesis can show balance: ex from S&S (Elinor): "She wold not be so weak as to throw away the comfort of a child, and yet retain the anxiety of a parent" (qtd. on 94)
• Marianne's speech in this novel, in the other hand, is more poetical and rhapsodic, to match her "sensibility"; Cowper (96); however, after her illness, she starts speaking in balances phrases like Elinor (96).
• MP (with a ref to Johnson!): "Dr Johnson's celebrated judgment as to matrimony and celibacy, and say, that though Mansfield Park might have some pains, Portsmouth could have no pleasures" (qtd. on 97)

• Austen's later works move away from the formal syntax seen above towards "a freer and more dramatic kind" (97); this includes dramatic punctuation - a lot of dashes (98).
• She frequently employs long sentences with hierarchal clause structures (102); however, this is sometimes juxtaposed to extremely short sentences for dramatic effect (102).
• Austen has sentences of over 100 words that Page argues are not hard to follow (107-108).

• EX: "To restrain him as much as might be, by her own manners, she was immediately preparing to speak with exquisite calmness and gravity of the weather and the night; but scarcely had she begun, scarcely had they passed the sweep-gate and joined the other carriage, than she found her subject cut up—her hand seized—her attention demanded, and Mr Elton actually making violent love to her: availing himself of the precious opportunity, declaring sentiments which must be already well known, hoping—fearing—adoring—ready to die if she refused him; but flattering himself that his ardent attachment and unequalled love and unexampled passion could not fail of having some effect, and in short, very much resolved on being seriously accepted as soon as possible." (qtd. on 108; from Emma; 125 words)

4: 'Frequent Conversations'

• The strong dialogue in Austen's novels can be seen as correlated to her interest in theater (114-15); ex: opening of P&P
• Austen's dialogue has the effect of seeming real while being entirely artificial (116-17).
• Austen's dialogues contain many short sentences, question and answer sets, and rapid exchanges (118).
• "It is language itself, often subtle departures from the norms of vocabulary and syntax, which usually carries the burden of meaning and suggestion." (119)
• Austen's characters do not present themselves to the reader as declarative speakers (119).
• "Indirect, or reported, speech may be the result of the wish to keep a character in the background, or reduce loquacity and diffuseness to economy and order, or to preserve narrative speed by giving the gist of a dialogue in the narrator's words without allowing it to occupy a disproportionate amount of space." (121)

• EX: "Mrs John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy, would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. She begged him to think again on the subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?" (qtd. on 122; S&S; Mrs. John Dashwood) - "The first sentence is straight narrative, in the 'voice' of the author; the third sentence is normal indirect speech; but the second and fourth are what is usually described as free indirect speech." (122)

• Austen developed and expanded the free indirect speech found in Fielding and Burney (124).

• Austen used free indirect speech more depending on the style of the novel she was writing - MP and Persuasion have more than P&P, for example (125).
• "For Jane Austen . . . the supreme virtue of free indirect speech . . . [is] that is offers the possibility of achieving something of the vividness of speech without the appearance for a moment of a total silencing of the authorial voice." (134)

• "More generally, it may be suggested that Jane Austen tends to renounce dialogue when events seem about to precipitate a scene with considerable emotional potential." (137)

• EX: "What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does" (qtd. on 137; from Emma)

• Austen distinguishes her characters by their speech, not in a parodic or extravagant way like Dickens, but in a restrained way (140-47).

• EX: naval language of Admiral Croft in Persuasion (141); hypochondriachal language of Mr. Woodhouse in Emma (142); pedantic and formal language of Mr. Collins in P&P (144)

• Lack of linguistic control and use of vulgarisms in Austen's works reveals not just lower status but also "lack of the civilized virtues of intelligence, taste and self-awareness. A 'low' expression tends, therefore, to be symptomatic of unsatisfactory moral or ethical standards." (148). (Page disagrees with Lascalles here, he writes.)

• Mary Crawford in MP is "careless" about language, just as she is about dress and morals (150-51).
• Mrs. Elton in Emma (152) - "example of the use of colloquial language as a form of social criticism and moral censure" (153).
• Isabella Thorpe in NA: words such as "delightful", "horrid", "charming", "vile", "heavenly", "frightful" (153)

• Characters such as Lucy Steele in S&S try to ape their social betters by using upper class language and fail miserably (155).
• "Hackneyed language is often accompanied by triteness or triviality of subject-matter." (156)
• "The obverse is the 'gentleman-like English' (and gentleman is not a word used lightly by Jane Austen) of Mr Knightley, who provides an unwavering standard against which the language of his moral inferiors may be measured. Such English avoids the homely, the hackneyed and the merely fashionable; it shuns the meretricious attractions of the new word, and does not succumb to the temptation to call little things by big names." (158)

5: The Epistolary Art

• Marianne is a letter-writing heroine - she engages in a clandestine correspondence with Willoughby like eighteenth-century epistolary heroines (175).
• Letters, the receipt and sending of, move the plot along in S&S, bearing witness to its original inception as an epistolary novel (176-77).

6: Conclusion

• "On the stylistic level, her vocabulary tends to be backward-looking and conservative, whilst her syntax is more obviously experimental and adventurous; but there are, inevitably, qualifications which need to be made to both parts of this statement, for she has an acute ear for lexical novelty, as her dialogue repeatedly illustrates, and she never completely abandons the formal sentence, though it is less in evidence in her later novels." (187)
• Imitation that doesn't do justice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that there is no passion so deeply rooted in human nature as that of pride." (qtd. on 189; from Susan Ferrier's The Inheritance (1824))
• Austen did not directly influence very many writers stylistically (190); perhaps Eliot's "ironic comedy" and "character-revelation" (192) as well as E. M. Forster's "realistic and self-revealing dialogue and ironic comment" (193), but drawing a direct line of descent is difficult (193).

Poovey

Poovey—The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer

Poovey's two chapters on Austen have a lot of specific detail and isolated arguments about individual novels. These chapters would be helpful when writing the pages on Lady Susan, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Persuasion. These chapters focus on Austen's varying presentations of individualism, emphasizing how Austen critiques individualism and promotes sociality. Although, at times, Poovey also seems to suggest that Austen wants to promote individual desire. Hmm. Overall, though, Poovey comes to the conclusion that Austen's writing supports a bourgeois view of the world, specifically one that separates the public from the private in an effort to control women.

• important Austen themes: "the process of a young girl's maturation" and "the complex relationship between a woman's desires and the imperatives of propriety" (172) - it is this second theme that Poovey focuses on

• overall trajectories and major themes: "In Lady Susan, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility, female desire is a natural force that is, at best, morally ambiguous; at worst, it is a force capable of distorting reality, of disrupting social relations, and of turning back on itself to fester or erupt in destructive sicknesses of body and mind. But in Pride and Prejudice and, more consistently, in her last novels, as Austen begins to consider some of the reasons why female desire takes these disastrous directions, she begins to be less ambivalent toward this source of personal energy and distress. . . . For in exploring the relationship between social situations and psychology, Austen suggests the way in which ideology is internalized and even psychologized. But because she does not wholly reject either social institutions or the power of individual desire, she is able to imagine the possibility of both personal moral education and institutional reform." (208)
• bourgeois themes: "Particularly through dramatizing such 'principled' yet passionate heroines as Fanny Price and Anne Elliot, Austen would be able to show how bourgeois ideology could be purged of its contradictions and how, when it was so reformed, it could accommodate female feeling without driving a woman's energy into self-destructive or anarchic forms." (212)

• "In retaining the premises and promises of romantic love . . . Jane Austen perpetuates one of the fundamental myths of bourgeois society. For the model of private gratification that romantic love proposes can disguise the inescapable system of economic and political domination only by foregrounding the few relationships that flatter our desire for personal autonomy and power. But the notion that romantic relationships actually have the kind of social power this emotional prominence suggests is only a fiction" (237)

• individual and society: "The tension between the stable communal values ideally at the heart of patriarchal society and the moral relativity implied by the individualistic defense of that society is implicit in all of Jane Austen's mature novels, but nowhere do its polarities emerge into such stark relief as in Persuasion." (224)
• romance: "the moral regeneration ideally promised by romantic love is as individual and as private as its agent. In fact, the fundamental assumption of romantic love—and the reason it is so compatible with bourgeois society—is that the personal an be kept separate from the social, that one's 'self' can be fulfilled in spite of—and in isolation from—the demands of the marketplace." (236)

• methodological issues: "the incompleteness and opacity of Austen's personal record often compound the notorious instability of her novelistic irony, thus leading us further into confusing (if delightful) ambiguity" (173)
• family in Austen: "Austen's experience of a close and supportive family also provided models both for the way an individual's desires could be accommodated by social institutions and for the context of shared values that an author could ideally rely on to provide a moral basis for art" (203)
• on irony: "Austen's irony, then, enables her to reproduce—without exposing in any systematic way—some of the contradictions inherent in bourgeois ideology; for by simultaneously dramatizing and rewarding individual desire and establishing a critical distance from individualism, she endorses both the individualistic perspective inherent in the bourgeois value system and the authoritarian hierarchy retained from traditional, paternalistic society." (205)
• Austen was not as popular as Edgeworth, Burney, Scott or Shelley (there are further details on this at 210-11).

Lady Susan "establishes the aesthetic and ethical issues that were to occupy her for the remainder of her career" (174), namely critiquing "propriety" and exploring the place of "individual desire"

• "By the end of [Lady Susan], the failure of every moral authority in Susan's society threatens to subvert any didactic effect this novel might have seemed to promise. On the one hand, Lady Susan constitutes an attack on propriety, which, paradoxically, Austen presents as both restrictive and permissive. Such morality, Austen suggests, is inadequate not because it has misrepresented female nature but because its attempt to control desire has served only to distort this powerful force, to drive it into artful wiles and strategems that are often both socially destructive and personally debilitating. On the other hand, because the world Austen depicts contains neither adequate outlets for this energy nor a paternal authority capable of mastering it, we cannot imagine what constructive form Susan's exuberance could take" (177)

• Austen's politics: "In keeping with this class affiliation, Jane Austen's fundamental ideological position was conservative; her political sympathies were generally Tory, and her religion was officially Anglican; overall, she was a 'conservative Christian moralist,' supportive of Evangelical ethical rigor even before she explicitly admitted admiring the Evangelicals themselves." (181)
• Sense and Sensibility "is a much darker novel than any of the juvenilia or the parodic Northanger Abbey (1818), and we might speculate that one origin of its somber tone and the eruptions of anarchic feeling that punctuate it likes in the anxiety with which Austen viewed individualism's challenge to paternalism." (183)

• "Almost every action in the novel suggests that, more often than not, individual will triumphs over principle and individual desire proves more compelling than moral law. Even the narrator, the apparent voice of these absolute values, reveals that moral principles are qualified in practice." (184)
• gender concerns: "Austen wants to convince the reader that female nature is simply inexplicable and that propriety must restrain this natural, amoral force." (190)

• "The anxieties Brandon unwittingly reveals suggest that Austen at least intuits the twin imperatives that anchor patriarchal society: men want women to be passionate, but, because they fear the consequences of this appetite, they want to retain control over its expression." (192)

• genre: "Despite its gestures toward realism, Sense and Sensibility repeatedly dismisses the analysis of society that realism might imply and instead embraces the idealism of romance." (193)
• individual and society: "throughout, she attempts to use realism to control the imaginative excesses that romances both encourage and depict: not only does the point of view repress the romantic plot, but Austen also suggests that Elinor's self-denial . . . ultimately contributes to her own happiness as well as to the happiness of others. The prerogatives of society, Austen suggestions, sometimes make secrecy and repression necessary; but if one submits to society, every dream will come true." (193)

Pride and Prejudice

• individual and society/genre: "Elizabeth's triumph signal the achievement of the balance that characterizes Austen's mature novels, for it is the result, on the one hand, of the gradual transformation of social and psychological realism into romance and, on the other, of a redefinition of romance. Essentially, Austen legitimizes romance by making it seem the corrective—not the origin or the product—of individualism." (194)

• "before [Elizabeth's] wish can be fulfilled, she must be 'humbled' by her own sister [Lydia]—not only so that she (and the reader) will recognize the pernicious effects of Lydia's passionate self-indulgence, but so that Elizabeth herself will understand how intimately her own fate is bound up in the actions and characters of others. Individualism is not simply morally suspect, Austen suggests; it is also based on a naĩve overestimation of personal autonomy and power. . . . for an individual living in society, every action is automatically linked to the actions of others" (199)
• "Darcy and Elizabeth, then, learn complementary lessons: he recognizes that individual feelings outweigh conventional social distinctions; she realizes the nature of society's power." (201)

• romance: "Romantic love remains the unexamined and unaccountable source of power in a novel preoccupied with various forms of social and psychological power and powerlessness. It not only overcomes all obstacles; it brings about a perfect society at the end of the novel." (201)
• on the first sentence: it "points to the radical limitations of both 'truth' and 'universally.' Masquerading as a statement of fact—if not about all unmarried men, then certainly about a community that collectively assumes it to be true—this sentence actually tells us more about Mrs. Bennet than anyone else." (204)

Mansfield Park

• aims with Fanny: If so ideal an exemplar of femininity could be made both sympathetic and powerful, Austen would be able to demonstrate how traditional society could be regenerated form within its own values and institutions." (212)

• "Austen's goal is to make propriety and romantic desire absolutely congruent. By showing how self-effacement can yield self-fulfillment, she will imaginatively purge ideology of the inequities and self-interest that currently make the expression of individual desire dangerous to society as a whole." (214)
• "For [Fanny], the ultimate reward of propriety would be simply to be loved by the man who has made her what she is." (217)
• Fanny is a "heroine of feeling"; Fanny's feelings and emotional outbursts drive the plot (218).
• "In the course of the novel Fanny must learn two things: to understand her feelings enough to be able to distinguish between selfishness and self-denying love, and to trust her feelings enough to be willing to act on them, even when they contradict more traditional, but less authentic, authority." (219)

Persuasion

• romance and society: "Typically, the private plot is repressed, although increasingly it competes with the public plot for the reader's attention; the overall narrative action of Persuasion involves the gradual emergence of the private plot into the public sphere and its eventual triumph, just as the overall content involves the ultimate victory of personal needs and desires over social conventions." (228)
• class theme: "In Persuasion Austen suggests that the landed classes have forfeited their moral authority partly through extravagance and a failure of social responsibility." (235)
• "Essentially, Persuasion advances the argument, proposed as early as Pride and Prejudice, that personal feeling can be a moral force within society." (235)

Said

Said—Culture and Imperialism

• Said argues that Austen participates in the colonial and imperialist project because she sets up landed estates as the center of existence while relegating the experience of the colonies to the periphery.
• "In British culture . . . one many discover a consistency of concern in Spenser, Shakespeare, Defoe, and Austen that fixes socially desirable, empowered space in metropolitan England or Europe and connects it by design, motive, and development to distant or peripheral worlds (Ireland, Venice, Africa, Jamaica), conceived of as desirable but subordinate." (52)
• "The perfect example of what I mean is to be found in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, in which Thomas Bertram's slave plantation in Antigua is mysteriously necessary to the poise and the beauty of Mansfield Park, a place described in moral and aesthetic terms well before the scramble for Africa, or before the age of empire officially began." (59)
• "Austen . . . in Mansfield Park sublimates the agonies of Caribbean existence to a mere half dozen passing references to Antigua." (59)
• "And part of such an idea was the relationship between 'home' and 'abroad.' Thus England was surveyed, evaluated, made known, whereas 'abroad' was only referred to or shown briefly without the kind of presence or immediacy lavished on London, the countryside, or northern industrial centers such as Manchester or Birmingham." (72)
• "In Austen, Balzac, George Eliot, and Flaubert—to take several prominent names together—the consolidation of authority includes, indeed is built into the very fabric of, both private property and marriage, institutions that are only rarely challenged." (77)
• "Jane Austen sees the legitimacy of Sir Thomas Bertram's overseas properties as a natural extension of the calm, the order, the beauties of Mansfield Park, one central estate validating the economically supportive role of the peripheral other." (79)
• "More clearly than anywhere else in her fiction, Austen here synchronizes domestic with international authority, making nit plain that the values associated with such higher things as ordination, law, and propriety must be grounded firmly in actual rule over and possession of territory. She sees clearly that to hold and rule Mansfield Park is to hold and rule an imperial estate in close, not to say inevitable association with it. What assures the domestic tranquility and attractive harmony of one is the productivity and regulated discipline of the other." (87)
• "According to Austen we are to conclude that no matter how isolated and insulated the English place (e.g., Mansfield Park), it requires overseas sustenance." (89)
• "The most important is the avowedly complete subordination of colony to metropolis. Sir Thomas, absent from Mansfield Park, is never seen as present in Antigua, which elicits at most a half dozen references in the novel." (90)
• "The Bertrams could not have been possible without the slave trade, sugar, and the colonial planter class; as a social type Sir Thomas would have been familiar to eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century readers who knew the powerful influence of the class through politics, plays...and may other public activities . . . Sir Thomas's infrequent trips to Antigua as an absentee plantation owner reflect the diminishment in his class's power" (94)

Southam

Southam—Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage

Editorial note: I have summarized the sources that Southam himself notes as particularly important rather than all of them.

Introduction: Volume 1

• "Only twelve contemporary reviews and notices are known to us, and even down to 1870 the record to sparse: fewer than fifty articles mention Jane Austen at any length and of these only six take her as the principal subject. After 1870 the situation takes a sudden change. In the space of two years there was a greater quantity of periodical criticism than had appeared in the previous fifty. This change was effected by the first book on Jane Austen, the Memoir by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, published in 1870" (1).
• "Pre-1870, Jane Austen was never thought of as a popular novelist nor did she get much attention from the Victorian critics and literary historians. . . . From the very beginning, the contemporary reviewers had welcomed the novels as something new, altogether better than the usual run of romantic fiction. During her lifetime Jane Austen knew that her works were fashionable. They enjoyed a reputation for their decorum, their realism and wit and they seem to have been widely read among the upper-middle classes, even in the court of the Prince Regent. And there was no lack of recognition from the few critics capable of grasping her achievement. . . . Yet throughout this period Jane Austen remained a critic's novelist—highly spoken of and little read." (2)
• Victorian critics preferred bold and serious works, like Dickens and Eliot.
• "The failure of Jane Austen's contemporaries to identify the force and point of her satire can be attributed in part to their disquiet at its implications. Some of her readers objected to what they could recognize as her attack upon the cherished values of romantic fiction. Others surely must have recognized that the fools and villains of Jane Austen's novels were uncomfortably close to themselves, their friends and neighbours." (18-19)
• "The size of Jane Austen's reading public between 1821 and 1870 is difficult to estimate, but we can safely describe it as minute beside the known audience for Dickens and his contemporaries." (20)
• "Overall, the history of publication indicates that Jane Austen enjoyed a small but steady following from the 1830s down to 1870, when the Memoir provided the public with a highly sympathetic identity for an author whose life-story was hitherto virtually unknown. During most of this period, the criticism of Jane Austen is remarkable only for its missionary zeal, not for its perceptions. The critics were enthusiastic, but weighed down by their sense that Jane Austen was out of fashion, little known, and unjustly undervalued." (21)

Scott, review of Emma in Quarterly Review, 1816

• John Murray asked Scott to review Emma; "this is the first major critical notice of Jane Austen" (58).
• Scott uses his review to discuss the nature of the novel, particularly its probability and respectability.
• "the author of Emma confines herself chiefly to the middling classes of society; her most distinguished characters do not rise greatly above well-bred country gentlemen and ladies; and those which are sketched with most originality and precision, belong to a class rather below that standard. The narrative of all her novels is composed of such common occurrences as my have fallen under the observation of most folks; and her dramatis personæ conduct themselves upon the motives and principles which the readers may recognize as ruling their own and that of most of their acquaintances. The kind of moral, also, which these novels inculcate, applies equally to the paths of common life" (64)

Whately on Jane Austen, 1821

• Richard Whately, "Archbishop of Dublin, was an experienced reviewer and writer, although this is his only known extensive piece of literary criticism. It takes its point of departure from Scott, beside which it ranks as the most important early nineteenth-century statement on Jane Austen." (87)
• "Miss Austin has the merit (in our judgment most essential) of being evidently a Christian writer: a merit which is much enhanced, both on the score of good taste, and of practical utility, by her religion being not at all obtrusive." (95)
• "The moral lessons also of this lady's novels, though clearly and impressively conveyed, are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story; they are not forced upon the reader, but he is left to collect them (though without any difficulty) for himself: her's is that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life; and certainly no author has ever conformed more closely to real life, as well in the incidents, as in the characters and descriptions." (95)
• "we suspect one of Miss Austin's great merits in our eyes to be, the insight she gives us into the peculiarities of female characters. Authoresses can scarcely ever forget the esprit de corps—can scarcely ever forget that they are authoresses. They seem to feel a sympathetic shudder at exposing naked a female mind. Elles se peignent en buste, and leave the mysteries of womanhood to be described by some interloping male, like Richardson or Marivaux, who is turned out before he has seen half the rites, and is forced to spin from his own conjectures the rest. Now from this fault Miss Austin is free. Her heroines are what one knows women must be, though one never can get them to acknowledge it." (100-101)

Scott on Jane Austen, 1822, 1826, 1827

• Extract from Journal entry, 14 March 1826: "Also read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!" (106)

Charlotte Brontë on Jane Austen 1848, 1850

• Brontë "wrote to G. H. Lewes after reading his review in Fraser's. She was gratified at his praise for her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), but puzzled, and perhaps even a little piqued, at the extent of his praise for Jane Austen." (126)

• 12 January 1848: "I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses." (126)

• 12 April 1850 to W. S. Williams: Austen "does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; there is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting: she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition...Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet" (128)

Lewes: The great appraisal, 1859

• From "The Novels of Jane Austen", Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (July 1859), unsigned; "Lewes's last and most important appraisal of Jane Austen" (148)
• "Miss Austen has nothing fervid in her works. She is not capable of producing a profound agitation in the mind. In many respects this is a limitation of her powers, a deduction from her claims. But while other writers have had more power over the emotions, more vivid imaginations, deeper sensibilities, deeper insight, and more of what is properly called invention, no novelist has approached her in what we may style the 'economy of art,' by which is meant the easy adaptation of means to ends, with no aid from extraneous or superfluous elements." (152)
• "Miss Austen is like Shakespeare: she makes her noodles inexhaustibly amusing, yet accurately real. We never tire of her characters. They become equal to actual experiences. They live with us, and form perpetual topics of comment. We have so personal a dislike to Mrs Elton and Mrs Norris, that it wold gratify our savage feeling ot hear of some calamity befalling them." (153)
• "But instead of description, the common and easy resource of novelists, she has the rare and difficult art of dramatic presentation: instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves." (157)
• "In what is commonly called 'plot' she does not excel. Her invention is wholly in character and motive, not in situation. her materials are of the commonest every-day occurrence. Neither the emotions of tragedy, nor the exaggerations of farce, seem to have the slightest attraction for her. The reader's pulse never throbs, his curiosity is never intense; but his interest never wanes for a moment. The action begins; the people speak, feel, and act; everything that is said, felt, or done tends towards the entanglement or disentanglement of the plot; and we are almost made actors are well as spectators of the little drama." (158)
• "the absence of breadth, picturesqueness, and passion, will also limit the appreciating audience of Miss Austen to the small circle of cultivated minds" (160)

Mrs. Oliphant on Jane Austen, 1870

• "Miss Austen and Miss Mitford", Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (March 1870), unsigned; "Margaret Oliphan, the novelist and historical writer, was one of the principal reviewers for Blackwood's. The occasion for this article was the publication of the Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) by J. E. Austen-Leigh."
• "Mr Austen Leigh, without meaning it, throws out of his dim little lantern a passing flame of light upon the fine vein of feminine cynicism which pervades his aunt's mind....It is the soft and silent disbelief of a spectator who has to look at a great many things without showing any outward discomposure, and who has learned to give up any moral classification of social sins, and to place them instead on the level of absurdities." (216)
• Oliphant describes Austen as perhaps "cruel" in making Charlotte Mr. Collins's wife and she describes the scene in which Charlotte's household arrangements are detailed so as to avoid contact with Mr. Collins as "diabolical" (220).
• In Emma, "it is not that the fun is less, or the keenness of insight into all the many manifestations of foolishness, by human sympathy has come in to sweeten the tale, and the brilliant intellect has found out, somehow, that all the laughable beings surrounding it—beings so amusingly diverse in their ananity and unreason—are all the same mortal creatures, with souls and hearts within them." (223)

Richard Simpson on Jane Austen, 1870

• Review of the Memoir, North British Review (April 1870), unsigned; "the article is one of the high points in the understanding of Jane Austen" (241)
• "This didactic intention is even interwoven with the very plots and texture of the novel. The true hero, who at last secures the heroine's hand, is often a man sufficiently her elder to have been her guide and mentor in many of the most difficult crises of her youth. Miss Austen seems to be saturated with the Platonic idea that the giving and receiving of knowledge, the active formation of another's character, or the more passive growth under another's guidance, is the truest and strongest foundation of love." (244)
• "That predestination of love, that preordained fitness, which decreed that one and one only should be the complement and fulfilment of another's being—that except in union with each other each must live miserably, and that no other solace could be found for either than the other's society—she treated as mere moonshine, while she at the same time founded her novels on the assumption of it as a hypothesis." (246)
• "Wickedness in her characters is neither unmixed with goodness, nor is it merely a defect of will; she prefers to exhibit it as a weakness of intelligence, an inability of the common-sense to rule the passions which it neither comprehends nor commands." (249)
• Man is a social being for Austen; "she broods over his history, not over his individual soul and its secret workings, nor over the analysis of its faculties and organs. She sees him, not as a solitary being complete in himself, but only as completed in society." (249)
• Austen "delights in introducing her heroines in their girlhood, shapeless but of good material, like malleable and ductile masses of gold. We have the flower in the germ, the woman's thought dark in the child's brain, the dream of the artist still involved in the marble block which some external force is to chip and carve and mould." (251)
• "Miss Austen would have made Romeo find out that Juliet was not worth having; and his former love for Rosaline would have revived, all the sweeter from the contrast with the sulphurous trial which the passing passion would have left behind it. This is the domestic and ironic way of treating love—a way which Miss Austen consider to be both more true and more amusing, since it exhibits such a contrast between aspirations and facts" (255).
• "She is neat, epigrammatic, and incisive, but always a lady" (264).
• "Might we not for like reasons borrow from Miss Austen's biographer the title which the affection of a nephew bestows upon her, and recognise her officially as 'dear aunt Jane'?" (265)

Introduction: Volume 2

• "Scott's account of Jane Austen as an anti-romantic novelist of everyday life and Whately's analytical essay were not superseded" until after 1870 (1).
• Compared to the Brontẽs, Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, Gaskell, and Eliot, Austen's books looked provincial and narrow (1).
• It was Austen-Leigh's Memoir which really sparked interest in Austen (2).
• "All we now now about Jane Austen's method of writing, her craftsmanship, her careful revision of the manuscripts and the attention she gave to her proofs, confirms Austen-Leigh's 'dear Aunt Jane' as an endearing fiction." (4)
• "while the general level of criticism is high [after 1870], amongst the individual pieces we find, nonetheless, a certain uniformity. We see the novels praised for their elegance of form and their surface 'finish'; for the realism of their fictional world, the variety and vitality of their characters; for their pervasive humour; and for their gentle and undogmatic morality and its unsermonising delivery. The novels are prized for their 'perfection'. Yet it is seen to be a narrow perfection, achieved within the bounds of domestic comedy." (13-14)
• Simpson's excellent essay is not used until Lionel Trilling quotes it in 1957 (17).
• Lewes campaigns for Austen, essentially, emphasizing her relationship to Shakespeare and how the literary elites prize her (20-21).
• Anne Thackeray reviewed Austen's works nostalgically, longing to escape from the effects of the industrial revolution (23-24).
• Southam praises Thackeray's analysis of Austen's works as well, but notes that it was not taken up until Leavis's Critical Theory (24).
• The "dear aunt Jane" model dominated the late nineteenth century early twentieth century. Austen was praised for her perfect art and limited scope. She was viewed as one who wrote effortlessly and for amusement (25-30).
• Britannica shows Austen's growing stature:

• 8th edition (1854): "an elegant novelist" (33)
• 9th edition (1875): "one of the most distinguished modern British novelists" (33)

• First critical books on Austen were published in the 1880s (34)
• Austen was drafted into the women's movement by Millicent Fawcett and drafted out of it by Coventry Patmore (39) - culture wars over Austen!
• Austen gets an entry in 1885 DNB by Leslie Stephen (42).
• Life of Jane Austen by Godwin Smith (1890), part of the Great Writers series; "signifies the recognition of Jane Austen as a standard classic author, and the book itself is important in the history of Jane Austen criticism, in marking what George Saintsbury called the beginning of 'formal criticism'" (43); Smith is a "fresh phase in the critical heritage" in which reviewers started to become critics (45)
• Around 1890, "there developed a small but vocal literature of dissent amongst those who (like James) felt their personal experience of the novels offended by the babble of the market-place." (46)
• "Austenolatry", as Stephens calls it, starts to crystallize in the 1880s (47).
• Austen's novels were published in America from 1832 onwards, often bowderlized (phrases such as "Good Lord!" and "Good God!" and "By Jove!" were removed) (49)
• Until after 1870, there was distinctive American response to Austen; much British criticism was simply repeated (49-50). "For American literary nationalists Jane Austen's cultivated scene was too pallid, too constrained, too refined, too downright unheroic." (52) For many American critics, Austen's canvas was simply not democratic enough, when it came to character, or vast enough, when it came to literal space (52).
• First popular edition of JA novels was in 1883 - Sixpenny Novels series published by Routledge (58). Fancy illustrated editions and collector's sets also started coming out at this time (58-59). In addition, more scholarly editions were published, with extensive introductions and explanatory notes (61-62).
• The word "Janeite" first appears in George Saintsbury's preface to P&P (1894) (65).
• "In the 1890s, the novels were also being recommended for the lessons in behaviour they held for young ladies of the new generation." (66)
• Austen novels were also starting to be read at universities in the 1890s (69). Austen appeared in textbook histories of the English novel, in both Britain and America (70).
• Howells, in his serialized essays in Harper's, helped make JA into a canonical figure for the populace; "these three essays still constitute the most ambitious and resounding claim on behalf of Jane Austen's supremacy in the realm of fiction" (72).
• "At the turn of the century, the debate in America is reflected in the joshing that went on between Howells and Mark Twain. . . . Twain set out to represent himself as Jane Austen's most ferocious and dedicated enemy, an offensive aimed more widely against the Anglophile tradition in American culture" (74).
• A. C. Bradley's lecture in 1911 at Newnham College marks a turning point (79); "the prime document for the serious study of Jane Austen" (79); established the "early" and "late" groupings of the novels (79); "where Bradley is totally original is in his discussion of Jane Austen's morality and religion, in crediting the novels with 'wisdom', and in finding a strong attachment to Johnson and Cowper." (79)
• "In 1913 came the definitive biography, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters: A Family Record by William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh" (82); no longer sentimental like the Memoir (82)
• 8 May 1913 - anonymous review in the TLS by Virginia Woolf of the 1913 JA biography, writing "an estimate of the 'damage' done by the novelist's 'conservative spirit', the 'chief damage' being to the men. For many TLS readers, this was the first occasion upon which anyone would have ventured to address them on Jane Austen's 'defects'—characters 'which bore us frankly', page which 'have to be skipped'." (85)
• "Farrer's piece has been described as the best short introduction to Jane Austen and it holds an important place in the historiography of criticism." (92); it is a Janeite piece without the worship; "the biographical fallacy is disposed of. The Shakespeare association is examined and redefined. The domestic myth is dismantled: there are no happy families in Jane Austen." (93)
• Chapman's magisterial edition is a turning point in criticism - the first scholarly edition of Austen's works. "He drew attention to the inclusions and exclusions in her portrait of society. He pointed to her knowledge of English and foreign literature." (99); "It is a remarkable enterprise, properly described as monumental (the large-paper, limited edition being especially splendid); historically important as the first such edition of any of the major English novelists." (99) - put out by Clarendon; facsimile title-page; divided by original three-volume structure; (99-100); "The binding, typeface and lay-out of the pages, including catch-words at the foot, have a Regency air." (100)
• The 1920s saw a boom in academic scholarship (107).
• E. M. Forster used JA's works as the prime example of those works which embodied the "round character" (109).
• During the 1930s, JA's art began to be discussed more (109-10).
• "In 1939, the formal study and criticism of the novelist was set on a new footing" with Lascelles Jane Austen and Her Art (124); first modern scholarly work (124); "the reviewers signalled their discomfort at seeing the discussion carried away from the home-ground of the common reader to become a communication between academics, increasingly demanding and increasingly specialised" (127)
• D. W. Harding's essay "Regulated Hatred" (1939); "amusing yet cruel deception" in Austen (127)
• Q. D. Leavis "Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writing" in Scrutiny (1941-44); argues that Austen is hard-working writer and that Leavis is the first person to see this; it was viewed as a discovery (Southam demonstrates that this is not the case) (129-30); "the documents collected in this volume show up the Scrutiny version of literary history as critical fiction" (131); Southam is harsh on the academics of the 1940s

Anne Thackeray on Jane Austen, 1871

• From "Jane Austen", Cornhill Magazine (1871), Southam calls it "by far the most influential of all the popularising accounts of Jane Austen" (164)
• "the ladies and gentlemen in Pride and Prejudice and its companion novels seem like living people out of our own acquaintance transported bodily into a bygone age, represented in the half-dozen books that contain Jane Austen's works. Dear books! bright, sparkling with wit and animation, in which the homely heroines charm, the dull hours fly, and the very bores are enchanting." (165)
• "All these people nearly start out of the pages, so natural and unaffected are they, and yet they never lived except in the imagination of one lady with bright eyes, who sat down some seventy years ago to an old mahogany desk in a quiet country parlour, and evoked them for us." (165)
• After reading the Memoir, "we feel more than ever that she [Austen], too, was one of these true friends who belong to us inalienably—simple, wise, contented, living in others, one of those whom we seem to have a right to love. Such people belong to all human-kind by the very right of their wide and generous sympathies, of their gentle wisdom and loveableness." (168)
• From revised version in A Book of Sibyls (1883): "She is writing in secret, putting away her work when visitors come in, unconscious, modest, hidden at home in heart, as she was in her sweet and womanly life, with the wisdom of the serpent indeed and the harmlessness of a dove." (170)

'narrow unconscious perfection of form', Henry James, 1883

• From Henry James to George Pellew, 32 June 1883: "I could have found it in me to speak more of her genius—of the extraordinary vividness with which she saw what she did see, and of her narrow unconscious perfection of form." (179)

Saintsbury on Pride and Prejudice, 1894

• From "Preface" to Pride and Prejudice (1894), published by George Allen
• Saintsbury was a "prolific critic and literary historian"; professor at the University of Edinburgh (214)
• "Walt Whitman has somewhere a fine and just distinction between 'loving by allowance' and 'loving with personal love'. This distinction applies to books as well as to men and women; and in the case of the not very numerous authors who are the objects of the personal affection, it brings a curious consequence with it. There is much more difference as to their best work than in the case of those others who are loved 'by allowance', by convention, and because it is felt to be the right and proper thing to love them. And in the sect—fairly large and yet unusually choice—of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the novels." (214-15)
• "Mr Collins is really great; far greater than anything Addison ever did, almost great enough for Fielding or for Swift himself. . . . In fact, for all the 'miniature,' there is something gigantic in the way in which a certain side, and more than one, of humanity, and especially eighteenth-century humanity, its Philistinism, its well-meaning but hide-bound morality, its formal pettiness, its grovelling respect for rank, its materialism, its selfishness, receives exhibition." (217-18)

The heroines, Howells, 1900-1

• From Heroines of Fiction (1901)
• "Her deeply domesticated life was passed in the country scenes, the country society, which her books portray, far from literary men and events; and writing as she used, amidst the cheerful chatter of her home, she produced literature of still unrivalled excellence in its way, apparently without literary ambition, and merely for the pleasure of getting the life she knew before her outward vision. With the instinct of and love of doing it, and not with the sense of doing anything uncommon, she achieved that masterpiece, 'Pride and Prejudice" (225)
• The story of 'Pride and Prejudice' has of late years become known to a constantly, almost rapidly, increasingly cult, as it must be called, for the readers of Jane Austen are hardly ever less than her adorers: she is a passion and a creed, if not quite a religion." (227)

Henry James on Jane Austen

• "Practically overlooked for thirty or forty years after her death, she perhaps really stands there for us as the prettiest possible example of that rectification of estimate, brought about by some slow clearance to stupidity, the half-century or so is capable of working round to. This tide has risen high on the opposite shore, the shore of appreciation—risen rather higher, I think, than the high-water mark, the highest, of her intrinsic merit and interest; though I grant indeed—as a point to be made—that we are dealing here in some degree with the tides so freely driven up, beyond their mere logical reach, by the stiff breeze of the commercial, in other words of the special bookselling spirit; an eager, active, interfering force which has a great many confusions of apparent value, a great many wild and wandering estimates, to answer for. For these distinctively mechanical and overdone reactions, of course, the critical spirit, even in its most relaxed mood, is not responsible. Responsible, rather, is 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, so amenable to pretty reproduction in every variety of what is called tasteful, and in what seemingly proves to be saleable, form." (230)

Mark Twain on Jane Austen

• From Following the Equator (1897): "Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it." (232)
• From a letter to W. D. Howells dated 18 January 1909: "To me his [Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's. No, there is a difference. I could his prose on salary, but not Jane's Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity to me that they allowed her to die a natural death!" (232) [The editor speculates that the misspelling is deliberate.]

A. C. Bradley on Jane Austen, 1911

• From "Jane Austen", a lecture given at Newnham College, Cambridge; printed in Essays and Studies (1911); "This lectures is generally regarded as the starting-point for the serious academic approach to Jane Austen (notwithstanding Bradley's Janeite tone as one of the 'faithful' addressing his fellow enthusiasts)." (233)
• "There are two distinct strains in Jane Austen. She is a moralist and a humorist. These strains are often blended or even completely fused, but still they may be distinguished." (234)

• Austen's moralism connects her with Johnson; "We remember Johnson in those passages where she refuses to express a deeper concern than she feels for misfortune or grief, and with both there is an occasional touch of brutality int he manner of the refusal." (234)

'her greatness as an artist', Virginia Woolf, 1913

• From an unsigned review of the Life and Letters' in the TLS on 8 May 1913
• "Virginia Woolf . . . was probably Jane Austen's most sympathetic critic in treating questions relating to the woman novelist." (240)
• "The chief reason why she does not appeal to us as some inferior writers do is that she has too little of the rebel in her composition, too little discontent, and of the vision which is the cause and the reward of discontent. She seems at times to have accepted life too calmly as she found it, and to any one who reads her biography or letters it is plain that life showed her a great deal that was smug, commonplace, and, in a bad sense of the word, artificial, It showed her a world made up of big houses and little houses, of gentry inhabiting them who were keenly conscious of their grades of gentility, while life consisted of an interchange of tea parties, picnics, and dances..." (242-43)

Farrer on Jane Austen, 1917

• "For Jane Austen has no passion, preaches no gospel, grinds no axe; standing aloof from the world, she sees it, on the whole, as silly. She has no animosity for it; but she has no affection. She does not want to better fools, or to abuse them; she simply sets herself to glean pleasure from their folly." (254-55)
• "For her whole sex she revolts against 'elegant females,' and sums up her ideal woman, not as a 'good-natured unaffected girls' (a phrase which, with her, connotes a certain quite kindly contempt), but as a 'rational creature.'" (256)
• "It is curious, indeed, how often Jane Austen repeats a favourite composition; two sympathetic figures, major and minor, set against an odious one. In practice, this always means that, while the odious is set boldly out in clear lines and brilliant colour, the minor sympathetic one becomes subordinate to the major, almost to the point of dulness." (269)

Todd

Todd—The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen

1: Life and times

• I will take no notes from this chapter, as Simmaren has the biographical material covered already.

2: The literary context

• F. R. Leavis and Ian Watt viewed Austen as the descendant of Fielding and Richardson (20). She "combined their qualities of interiority and irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both" (20).
• Mary Lascalles, around the same time as Leavis and Watt, argued that Austen was a descendant of Samuel Johnson (20). According to her, Austen's "moral lexicon of general abstract terms such as 'manners', 'duty', and 'good-breeding', reflects a Johnsonian belief that society agreed on their distinct meaning within a universal standard" (20).
• Feminist criticism in the 1970s placed Austen alongside Burney, noting the similarities between their styles (burlesque) and plots (male mentors) (21-22).
• Austen, while like some of the 1790s novelists, does not propose "more rigorous and rational education" like Wollstonecraft does. "Austen rejected the views of her more utopian contemporaries, that education including environment could determine development and character and so engineer an earthly paradise." (23)
• Austen creates an illusion of realism in her texts, partly through readerly identification with the characters and partly through rounded characters, who have a history and a memory (27). Characters "seem 'real' to the reader because they, like readers, are watchers of others, second-guessers, puzzlers of texts, while imagining people outside themselves." (28)
• Austen is not a Romantic - her heroines are not "the self-obsessed heroes of Romantic poetry" (28).
• Austen was influenced by drama, particularly Sheridan and Shakespeare (29).
• Until the end of the nineteenth century, Scott was much more popular than Austen. It was only the literary elite who read Austen (32). The turning point was the publication of Austen-Leigh's Memoir in 1870, which made Austen appealing to a wide audience and cast her a quintessentially British writer (32).
• In the twentieth century, Austen became renowned for her irony and technical prowess (33). "Dear Jane" became the inaugurater of the Leavis's "Great Tradition" of novel-writing (33).
• Feminist criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly Gilbert and Gubar, saw Austen as feminist writer hampered by her circumstances (33).
• In the 1970s, Duckworth and Butler's works argued that Austen was a political writer, notably a conservative who endorsed Burke's view of the world (34).
• In the 1980s and 1990s, ideological, postcolonial, and Marxist criticism has dominated Austen studies (34-35).

Editorial note

• This is a very helpful general book; its chapters on the novels would be excellent for the novel pages. I will therefore leave those notes for later.

Waldron

Waldron—Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time

Introduction

• Jane Austen had two major criticisms of contemporary fiction (e.g., Mary Brunton's Self-Control): it portrayed "unnatural conduct" and it lacked "probability". Austen was surely aware, from her reading of Johnson's essays, of the general view that "a work of fiction ought to combine a moral tendency with a credible scenario". She appears to have felt that contemporary fiction was jettisoning the "credible scenario" in favor of moral didacticism, of polemic, of what she called "cant". "This may have seemed particularly evident in the 1790s as the novel became the focus of a radical-conservative debate about morality in the wake of the French Revolution." 2.

• "Austen "set about a challenge to contemporary assumptions, attempting to free fiction from elements which she thought hampered its relationship with its readers — perhaps broke the illusion which she supposed a fiction-writer was trying to create. In making this effort she created a new kind of novel which put all of her predecessors and contemporaries more or less in the shade and ensured that her work outlived theirs." 3.

• Pages 3-13 comprise a thoughtful history of Austen criticism and reception, worth reviewing for and citing in the relevant subarticle.

• It is possible to construct a unifying critique of Austen's work based on her own view of what she was about and her knowledge of the society in which she found herself. Austen's letters and the novels themselves help to identify what drove Austen to write. Although secure in her place with her family in society, Austen was well aware of its snobberies and hypocrisies. There can be no doubt about her discontent with fiction as she found it. She considered the fixed moral program which justified the existence of many contemporary novels as absurd and unnecessary. "Her aim was to dispense with the fixed programme, at the same time using the assumption that it would be presenting order to splinter the reader's allegiances, putting the locus of moral approval in continual doubt. This was made more effective by the reduction of setting to a certain kind of commonplace domestic scene." 13. Because Austen's focus was not on the improbable or awful predicaments in which her heroines found themselves, her readers could be more open to the intricacies of their minds, which are always more complicated and interesting, and show more weaknesses, than at first appears. 14.

• Austen's fictional worlds become so extraordinarily complex that there is no need for filler. "The stories speak for themselves and take care to impose no perfect solution. Readers are always left with the possibility of choice in their responses to the actions and thoughts of the main characters." 15.

  Because Austen wrote consciously against the grain of contemporary didacticism but within a familiar fictional framework, her narratives become not only ironic but richly contrapuntal; we are conscious of the presence of a number of points of view at every turn. It is perhaps this special narrative complexity that has proved so permanently satisfying even to readers with little or no knowledge of the literary matrix which gave it birth. But an appreciation of the ways in which her immediate predecessors and contemporaries impinged upon her writing adds immeasurably to that pleasure. 15.

Chapter 1: The juvenilia, the early unfinished novels and Northanger Abbey

• Thesis of Ch. 1:

  Early in her reading experience, Jane Austen became obsessively interested in the form and language of the novel, and in its relationship with its readers; her first experimental writing was dominated by attempts to refashion fiction as she knew it. With merciless disrespect she isolated elements which were at best formulaic, at worst perfunctory. Early burlesque shows Austen identifying popular narrative forms as hypnotic and thought-denying. She was moved to make hilarious fun of the wilder examples of the novel of sensibility.... Her earliest writing puts a number of fashionable fictional stereotypes, often derived from the pomposities of conduct literature as well as from fashionable progressive ideas, into a domestic frame which renders them ludicrous and, more importantly, shows them to be repetitious and stultifying. From the start she set out to put forms and theories to the test of the everyday, without which they were, as she saw it, merely substitutes for coherent and rational deliberation. 16.

  [This implicitly assumes that we have access to Austen's earliest writings. Given that the extant Juvenilia are found in carefully prepared "fair copies" rather then original manuscripts, it seems likely to me that those works represent the cream of Austen's earlier writing, the family's (or her own) favorites, and not the entirety or even a representative sample of the early writing. Accordingly, the comments should be evaluated as pertaining to such of Austen's early writings as Austen herself selected and preserved. PCM]

• The early writings (Jack and Alice, Love and Freindship, Lesley Castle) show that Austen was fascinated by the language of contemporary moral discourse. She parodies formulaic phrase-building (e.g., the Johnsonian anthesis: "Tho' A & B, she was C & D") and uses common sentence patterns to create nonsense or to reverse conventional moral expectations. Her point: "mouthing phrases can be a substitute for thought, language can be used as a soporific." 16-17. Austen parodies the conventions of the popular sentimental novel by demonstrating that the reversals of current social convention shown in them (contempt for the practicalities of life, for parental guidance, for the ordinary demands of family (for marriage before cohabitation) and society (to eschew crime) are ridiculously impractical (and not simply immoral). "She invents characters who are dead to all common sense." 17.

• Waldron chooses to treat Catherine or the Bower together with Lady Susan and The Watsons, on the grounds that Catherine is a far more complex fiction than the earlier Juvenilia. She feels that the reasons why these works were abandoned may shed some light on Austen's changing aims as a writer. All three works show Austen moving beyond simple burlesque of fashionable sentiment toward an attack on contemporary conduct books. Austen saw these as thoroughly mindless and irrelevant to social realities. Catherine, for example, is the anti-type of the conduct books: she is intelligent, has plenty of common sense, and is warm, good humored and friendly rather than showing the "proper" modest reserve. Characteristically, Catherine is confused by two or three conflicting imperatives: the conduct book strictures represented by her guardian, Mrs. Percival; the "forward" behavior of young men she meets (Stanley, Edward); and the requirements of conventional "good manners".

  This clash of two or three imperatives confusing the actions and thoughts of protagonists was to become typical of the development of an Austen novel, and is helped on by the style indirecte libre which Austen did not perhaps invent, but which reaches a very high degree of sophistication in her hands even in this piece of a novel. 20.

  It is also characteristic that "responsible adults" (Mrs. Percival in Catherine, Mrs. Allen in Northanger Abbey, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice) fail grossly to provide meaningful assistance to protagonists in dealing with the real moral issues they face. 21. "In Catherine we have the first early glimpse of the typical Austen heroine wandering virtually pilotless among a number of moral and social paradigms designed to guide her but, from their impractical nature, incapable of doing any such thing. 22.

• Why did Austen abandon Catherine? Southam suggested that it was because Austen lost control of the character, who failed to become a single unified personality. Waldron rejects this idea: "Jane Austen was not in the business of creating 'unified' heroines—or heroes, for that matter." 22. Instead, Waldron suggests, it may have been the strong contrast between Catherine's complexity and the simplicity of the other main characters that created a problem. "No one in the story except Catherine seems likely to develop in an unforeseen way." 23.

• In Catherine, the character of Camilla shows the way Austen's fiction was developing. She "is given a mode of speech brilliantly exposing fashionable cant." 23. Camilla cannot carry on a conversation without using some fashionable stock phrase ("in the world") the meaning of which she has given no thought to. Camilla cannot experience real feeling, since all of her emotions are mediated through meaningless formulas and empty hyperbole. "Moreover, and perhaps more damning, she pretends to judge books without reading them, as part of a general presentation of herself as fashionably in the swim." 24.

• Lady Susan was probably written between Catherine and the first draft of Elinor and Marianne. LS and E & M were both originally written in epistolary form, although E & M was recast as straight narrative during its later revisions. Epistolary form ultimately did not suit Austen because it made it difficult to portray complexity of character. In Catherine, Austen used free indirect speech, which allowed her to show Catherine speculating about her own motives and deceiving herself and to enlighten the reader through irony. "It must have struck Austen that the possibilities in her kind of straight narrative for manipulation of the reader's attention and allegiance are infinitely greater and require much less space than the exchange of letters." 25.

• Why did Austen not complete The Watsons? Perhaps because Emma Watson is too much the "perfect" heroine, who has no difficulty distinguishing the good from the bad in her surroundings. "A heroine who consistently got things right would not do for the mature Austen." 26. Austen could have revamped the work but probably chose to incorporate parts of it into the eventual revision of First Impressions and abandon the rest. "Elinor and Marianne seems to have offered greater possibilities . . . for double and treble reader-perception, for moral doubt and relativity." 26.

• Waldron believes that Northanger Abbey was originally conceived very early, "for even in its final form it is more schematic in its engagement with popular fiction that any of the other completed novels and is much closer to burlesque". 26. The heroine, Catherine Morland, is portrayed from the first as an anti-heroine. Not an orphan (she has lots of relatives), not pretty, not clever, she seems at first to be very sensible and (unlike a Gothic heroine) not aware of parallels between her own life and her reading. 26-28.

• Rather than caricaturing inadequate parents/guardians as she had done in Catherine or the Bower, Austen describes parents who are superficially ideal but in practice unhelpful. Catherine is left without any effective mentors or advisers and must trust her own untutored reactions which sometimes seem untrustworthy but as the story develops appear more reliable than the advice she gets from others. 28.

• Waldron presents a comparison between Catherine and other heroines of contemporary fiction: Arabella of The Female Quixote and Emmeline of Charlotte Smith's Emmeline. Austen has created a double perception, a "layering of the reader's response that is the innovative aspect of this novel." Catherine approaches the world through her common sense, which seems both down-to-earth and very naive. Sensible Catherine is not vulnerable to Isabella's sentimental posturing, but by contrast she doesn't know what to make of the Tilney family and particularly General Tilney because the dynamics of that family (greed and petty family tyranny) are so far removed from her experience that she has nothing more to go on than her reading. 30-31. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the heroine is isolated from the everyday world among people with hidden and terrifying purposes. Catherine, by contrast, is in the midst of a crowd of perfectly ordinary people "who have no apparently nefarious agendas, but are only selfish, ignorant, obtuse or, to her (but not to the reader), impenetrable." 31. With the Tilney family, Catherine cannot understand for a long while that Henry and Eleanor Tilney "are in a state of unusual subjection to their father" because this is so foreign to her own experience. 31-32. Because she cannot explain the General's behavior and the strange depressing effect he has on his children from her own experience, Catherine begins to connect him with her reading of Gothic novels. Catherine knows that something is wrong in the Tilney household; she simply looks in the wrong place for an explanation. 32-33.

• What is new in Northanger Abbey is a blurring of moral focus. Catherine has been both sensible and silly and the reader does not know whether to approve of her or not. Henry Tilney subjects himself to his father's tyranny to Catherine's detriment although he is financially independent and doesn't have to do so. The minor characters (Mrs. Morland, Mr. Allen) fail to save Catherine from her unpleasant experiences but their behavior is more insensitive and apathetic than really blameworthy. A couple of the villains are truly bad, but almost everyone else in the book is morally ambivalent, passively unconcerned, stupid. 35.

Chapter 2: The non-heiresses: The Watsons and Pride and Prejudice

• Waldron identifies a strong structural and thematic connection between Pride and Prejudice and Fanny Burney's Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796. While critics such as Marilyn Butler have criticized Austen in P & P for having failed to subvert Burney because Austen "fudged the moral issue" by representing intelligence as a whole as faulty, Waldron feels that this was deliberate and a part of Austen's challenge to her contemporaries. 37.

• In contrast to the heroines of sentimental novels, who seem to be able to survive "without the vulgar necessities of life", Burney seems obsessively concerned with money. "Burney also clearly intended to cut through this high-minded contempt for the practicalities of life by showing how very necessary, particularly for women, was the certainty of a 'provision'..." 37. Inheritance was the principal problem facing the heroines of both Cecilia (1782) and Camilla. This was not the sort of problem met with frequently in ordinary life. Austen "wanted to bring fiction closer to the experience of her readers in order to press home what Burney had begun to identify — that in life there are neither ideal people nor perfect solutions to their problems." Burney's heroines adhered to the standards of female obedience and submission prevalent in fiction of the 1780s. 38.

• In The Watsons, Austen attempted to modify the Burney model but ended up creating a heroine something like Burney's Cecelia. Emma Watson also loses an inheritance and finds herself exposed to the "sordid machinations of the marriage market and the narrow-minded speculations of her illiberal relations." 38. Austen's version is different, however, because in comparison to Cecilia, the scenario is less grandiose, the focus is closer and we have more insight into Emma's feelings as she attempts to navigate her world. 38.

• In 1811, after Sense and Sensibility was accepted for publication, Austen returned to First Impressions and revised it extensively. We know that the original version was much longer than the published novel. Waldron believes that there are hints of P & P in Catherine and The Watsons and that Austen imported certain elements of those earlier works as part of her revisions of First Impressions. Like Emma Watson, Elizabeth Bennet is caught up in an inheritance problem — the entail of Longbourne away from the female line — and both Emma and Elizabeth come under great pressure to find husbands in order to solve the problem of their maintenance after their fathers die. Mrs. Bennet's obsession with husband-hunting has parallels in Emma Watson's sisters and Lord Osborne in The Watsons fills approximately the same ecological niche as Darcy (Osborne is described as being cold, careless and out of his element when he attends the first winter assembly and meets Emma).

• Emma is much closer to Cecilia than Elizabeth Bennet is. Emma meets her problems with unfailing dignity and cheerful tolerance. She is able to see through the "agreeable" but snobbish and egotistical Tom Musgrave and reject his attentions. She is, in short, unnaturally and improbably good, and this quality may have caused Austen to abandon the work rather than completing it. 40. "Elizabeth Bennet departs quite startlingly from the Gregory [conduct book] — and the Burney — ideal." We can be sure that young women like Elizabeth existed during the period 1795-1813, or conduct books would not have been thought necessary, would not have had the strong market reception they did. Novelists of the period largely thought it important to illustrate "proper" standards of decorum or, in the case of the radical novelists, concentrated on issues they thought to be more important than behavior and decorum. "Elizabeth is quite new....she does wish to subject current shibboleths to intelligent examination instead of accepting them blindly, and, extraordinarily for the fiction of the time, she is encouraged in her behavior by her father." 41.

• The episode of Elizabeth's visit to Netherfield to visit Jane during her illness is "a brilliantly successful exercise in the fragmentation of attention." 43. The reader is made aware of multiple currents within Elizabeth's consciousness: Elizabeth's pride in being a "studier of character" and her view of Bingley's, her embarrassment at her mother's vulgar comments and her need to appear to be the supportive and dutiful daughter, her concern for Jane's prospects with Bingley, her sparring with Bingley's two sisters. At the same time, the reader is made aware of multiple currents within other viewpoint characters: Bingley's uncertainties about himself, Darcy's attraction to and reservations about his interest in Elizabeth, the snobbery of Bingley's sisters, Caroline Bingley's desire to marry Darcy, Mrs. Bennet's "eye on the main chance" toward Bingley as a husband for Jane. 42-43. "This dispersal of reader-perception involves an authorial detachment about the heroine which is new. We do not have a focus for approval or disapproval, as we always have, for instance, in Camilla." 43.

• The episode at Netherfield also opens up a general dialog on the topic of marriage. "Because the question does not revolve around enormous inheritances and eccentric wills, but the ordinary prosaic decisions of the gentry families, the exploration can be much more detailed and complex than in Burney and leave the girls, particularly, with a far more convoluted set of options." 43. The dialog centers on Charlotte Lucas and exposes a fundamental contradiction in received conduct book doctrine: "how is a girl to retain what Gregory and others call her "delicacy" and get herself decently off her family's hands?" 43. Austen clearly wanted to explore this contradiction at a different level from Burney. The issue was presented in The Watsons, but much more crudely. Emma Watson's sister Elizabeth argues that Emma's circumstances have deprived Emma of the luxury of "delicacy" and "refinement" and that Emma must find a way to be both feminine and predatory. 43-44. The episode of Charlotte Lucas' engagement to Mr. Collins covers much the same ground, but "has that complexity and depth — what I have called counterpoint — which is typical of Austen's mature fiction; the narrator leaves readers alone with the evidence and presents no conclusion. " 44. This lack of authorial direction, this sense of choice, had not previously been thought appropriate to fiction, and "is effective in increasing involvement by allowing the reader to recognize and share in the doubts and dilemmas of the protagonists and, with them, come to no effective conclusion." 45. Interestingly, in this debate, it is Elizabeth who retails many of the views of the conduct books on marriage, and Charlotte who jettisons conventional pieties in pursuit of marriage. Unlike Emma Watson, Elizabeth Bennet is portrayed as someone who sometimes holds very inconsistent views. 45-46.

• Elizabeth engages in a debate with her Aunt Gardiner over the propriety of Wickham's pursuit of Mary King, the new-made heiress. Here, Mrs. Gardiner is the repository and exponent of conduct book wisdom and Elizabeth who questions it strongly. This "back and forth" by Elizabeth was disconcerting to contemporary readers, who expected to be told what to think of main characters. "Elizabeth is disturbing comfortable norms — is she good, or isn't she?" 48. "[I]n following her thoughts, we come much closer to a confrontation with some contemporary taboos than Burney ever does. But it is up to us, the readers, to make of it what we will." 48. Moreover, as in Catherine or the Bower and NA, the young and relatively inexperienced heroine is left with only conduct book rules and therefore without practical adult guidance in these matters. Austen thereby blurs the issues in a way that increases reader involvement. 48

• Darcy presents much the same kind of complexity when compared with his predecessors Sir Charles Grandison et al. He chooses unusual friends in the Bingleys, he seems awkward at the Meryton ball and is perhaps insecure in the responsibilities that have been his since an unusually early age. His cousin, Col. Fitzwilliam, views his unsociable behavior as odd. He is greatly troubled by his developing feelings toward Elizabeth; while the Bingleys by reason of their wealth are (barely) socially acceptable or can be made so, the Bennets as a family (relatively poor, with vulgar "connections") are clearly highly dubious according to Darcy's usual standards. 49-50. Darcy does not exhibit the usual carelessness of his aristocratic predecessors — he is anxious that his behavior be "correct" and be perceived so. 50-51. His response to Elizabeth's jibe that she is "perfectly convinced that Mr. Darcy has no defect" is insecure and defensive. "The direct interaction between confident heroine and insecure hero is new in fiction." 51.

• Waldron believes that Austen knew Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son (1774) well, disliked it and had it in mind when creating the characters of Mr. Collins and Mr. Darcy. Darcy's dislike of dancing and his low estimation of humor are echoes of Chesterfield. However, Darcy omits the hypocrisy and double-dealing Chesterfield recommended to his son. Darcy is too honest to behave this way and his character "exposes the contradictions in this supposed manual of 'practical morality' for young gentlemen." 51-53. Darcy also ignores Chesterfield's advice to avoid "low company". 53-54.

• Darcy's attraction to Elizabeth's body, intellect and character cause him to act in ways totally inconsistent with his avowed principles. His is the most important "moral muddle" of the novel. While critics usually find his character inconsistent, it is clear to Waldron that this is Austen's deliberate (and carefully deliberated) choice. 54-55.

• Elizabeth's intense dislike of Darcy begins to change, chaotically, after his first proposal, her rejection, and her receipt of his letter of explanation. She castigates herself for allowing herself to be mislead by Wickham, she is flattered and no longer angered by his proposal, and she begins to feel chagrin and hopelessness at the justice of his comments about her family. 55-56. "Moreover, she feels sorry for him — an entirely new feeling, and not one that is totally justified by events. Such an analysis of the impact of new information on a resisting mind could only have been accomplished in so short a space and so convincingly by the use of free indirect style." 56.

• After Elizabeth's rejection of Darcy's proposal and before her visit to Pemberley, Darcy disappears from the narrative for a considerable period. The reader finds out later what has happened to him, how his thinking has changed, but in the meantime the reader has no access to Darcy's mind and has no idea what is happening. "The whole situation is open in a way new to fiction." 56.

• Elizabeth learns much more of Darcy during her visit to Pemberley and approves of what she learns. Austen does not follow the Burney model in describing Elizabeth's interest in Darcy. "Camilla and Cecilia spend a good deal of fruitless energy trying to prove how little they care for wealth and position. Elizabeth does care for it, and is able to admit it to herself." 57. "It is open to the reader to decide what is going on here — does the power of sexual attraction override all other consideration? Which of the two is making the greater concession and why? Within the enveloping conventional love-encounter, innumerable questions introduce themselves." 58.

• Another example of Austen's repudiation of the conventions of contemporary fiction is Darcy's use of his fortune to "solve" the problem of Lydia's elopement with Wickham and the reactions to it. In 18th and 19th century fiction, wealth had strong sexual overtones in that it could be used by its normal possessors (men) as a displaced form of seduction. In a conventional novel, Darcy might have felt strong hesitations about putting the Bennet family and Elizabeth so much in his debt, and out of "delicacy" Elizabeth would have refused his actions. In P & P, everyone behaves differently. Mr. Bennet is happy to benefit from Darcy's actions, and Elizabeth ignores the conventional reaction to Darcy's explanation of what he has done and allows him to express his love and propose to her again. 58-60. Austen also avoids the conventional happy ending at the end of the story and "leaves just as much for the reader to do as the rest of the novel." 60. The reader is not allowed to forget the host of problems which the multiple marriages (Wickham-Lydia, Darcy-Elizabeth, Jane-Bingley) will bring. Waldron remarks that jugggling all of the relations and relationships, all of the likes and dislikes, "must have made the Pemberley guest-list extremely complicated." 61.

Chapter 3: Sense and the single girl

• S & S was the first of Austen's novels to be published but Waldron argues that in its seriousness it belongs with Mansfield Park among the works of Austen's "middle period of development". In atmosphere, Pride and Prejudice is much closer to the Juvenilia, with its humor and burlesque.

  There is much to support the idea that in Sense and Sensibility Austen no longer found the simple moral dichotomies of contemporary fiction merely funny. The novel probes deeper into the mores of contemporary society to find, not the obtuse but ultimately impotent snobbery of Lady Catherine, but selfish greed and malice prepense, which are rendered both respectable and potentially destructive by the support of the society in which they operate. 62.

The evil in S & S is personified in Mrs. Ferrars, Fanny Dashwood and Lucy Steele while in P & P it is more impersonal (the entail), and the two heroines in S & S confront a much more powerful and complex set of economic forces with much less certainty how (or if) they will break free. 62-63.

• Critics have assumed that Austen wrote S & S to make an ideological point but don't agree on what that point was: the simple opposition of "sense" and "sensibility" has long been abandoned, but critics generally view the point as either the defeat of individualism and spontaneity by sober Christian virtues or an attack on the conventions of Austen's society and therefore on the "patriarchy". Waldron believes that Austen wrote S & S to challenge not ideologies but contemporary fictions which, in attacking relativism argued by example that the problems of life are easily solved by the application of one theory or another. Both Elinor and Marianne begin the novel believing that they can cope with life by applying theoretically ideal standards, and both learn that they must be pragmatic to survive. Austen refers indirectly to two modes of contemporary fiction, the polemical/moral novel of the 1790s and the sentimental novel to which the first reacted. The first mode is reflected in the present of the story, while the second underlies Colonel Brandon's story of the past. Austen examines both modes in terms of what she elsewhere terms "probability" and challenges the simplistic solutions of many of contemporary novelists. 63.

• S & S was written, developed and revised against the background of contemporary novels by Jane West (A Gossip's Story, A Tale of the Times) and Maria Edgeworth ("The Letters of Julia and Caroline", Belinda) which embodied contrasting positive and negative characteristics in pairs of female characters. Austen, aware of the myriad possible connotations of terms like "sense" and "sensibility", viewed simplistic contemporary fictional practice as cant and instead presented a story in which many possible meanings of the critical terms appear. 63-65. "Different kinds of sense and sensibility are juxtaposed and set against one another in a complex web of relationships, motives and desires in which only the thoroughly unscrupulous can be seen to be able to triumph over intractable circumstance." 65.

• Austen set out to "put her own gloss" on the concept of "sensibility", detaching from it it from the political anxieties present in contemporary fiction and reverting to its earlier identification with true civilizing behavior. Edgeworth and West at every opportunity portray sensibility as chaotic, unsystematic and destructive. In her portrayal of Marianne, by contrast, Austen shows a character who does not abandon rationality in the pursuit of feeling but instead examines social conventions rationally and flouts those which make no rational sense. 65-66. Marianne is an intelligent, sympathetic and attractive character, but her approach to life "is doomed by the overwhelming dominance of the vulgar and commonplace in everyday life, which will, either by stupidity or malice, not only resist the efforts of a few idealists to counter it, but often seek to destroy them." 66. Marianne is not presented as corrupted by dangerous modern political theories. 67.

• Elinor, who in another author's novel would reject everything Marianne represents, does not view Marianne as immoral or misguided. Elinor is instead sympathetic with Marianne's beliefs and deep feelings and disagrees with her about behavior and taste rather than about morality. Elinor keeps her equally deep feelings to herself but never suggests that because Marianne expresses her feelings those feelings must be superficial or invalid. Elinor adheres to an older tradition of behavior but is shown by Austen as just as likely to err, just as prone to overdo her convictions, as Marianne. Her prudence is not always the right response to events. 67-68. "As soon as this is perceived — and it seldom is — the novel becomes something new to fiction, for the conventional centre of moral authority, previously thought essential, disintegrates as the story develops." 68.

• Unlike major characters in other contemporary novels, Elinor's character is mixed (and therefore more real). After Marianne's first encounter with Willoughby and her enthusiastic response to him, Elinor's reaction is humorous but also slightly sour. 70-71. "The urge to deflate is not endearing, and is not here intended to be so." 71. Elinor at the time has no basis for being so scathing. Waldron comments that "Marianne is often surprisingly tolerant of Elinor." 71. Just as Marianne must suffer because Willoughby refrains from declaring himself, Elinor must suffer confusion, unhappiness and uncertainty during and after Edward's visit. Edward's behavior is evasive and strange, and leaves Elinor in inner turmoil, which she is careful to hide, and as obsessed by him as Marianne is obsessed by Willoughby. 72-75. "This ostensible quiet acceptance tempered with a modicum of human frailty and inner turmoil is Austen's way of transforming the somewhat priggish censoriousness of Edgeworth's and West's Caroline and Louisa, and the conduct-book correctness of Belinda, into a modified stoicism which is attractive as well as believeable." 75. In the end, Elinor is the repository of Austen's message: no one can ever be wholly right or wholly wrong. This is best illustrated by Willoughby's final meeting with Elinor and his defense of his own behavior. Afterwards, Elinor feels sympathy for Willoughby "and forgives him for becoming the product of a venal and uncaring society." 77-78. Elinor is careful never to let the rest of her family know of her changed feelings, however. 78.

• Using the character of Col. Brandon, Austen upsets the traditional scheme of the oppositional courtship novel "and immeasurably increases the potential of the story to challenge fictional stereotypes." 78. At first, Col. Brandon appears dull, conventional, old, but as he tells his story to Elinor, someone much more interesting is revealed. Col. Brandon's "back story" critiques a common narrative device in sentimental novels, the long account of a past history, that Austen ridiculed in other contexts (e.g., Plan of a Novel). Col. Brandon's story is much shorter and more dramatic than these, and in it Brandon is presented not as the man of sense but as a sort of flawed romantic hero. 79-80.

  The interpolation of the sentimental plot serves to demonstrate the largeness of Brandon's heart and the fatal narrowness of Willoughby's, and to remind all concerned how mixed is the human spirit, and how little appearances are to be trusted. Brandon, apparently the embodiment of 'sense', with a reserved manner and currently staid way of life, is revealed as a man who has in the past been ruled by sensibility and to a great extent, still is; while Willoughby, clearly at first presenting the ideal face of sensibility to Marianne, has reverted to the kind of 'sense' demonstrated so clearly by ... John and Fanny Dashwood—attention beyond all other considerations to the securing of a good income. 80-81.

• S & S is often criticized for its facile, conventional ending. 81. Waldron rejects this view: "Austen's closures always have double or triple resonances, and this novel's conclusion is no exception." 82. The ending is an ironic contrast to the endings of "sensible" novels, because Marianne gets to marry the only really romantic lead in the cast, with whom she shares a great deal in terms of outlook and temperament. To so so, she is not required to change her own nature in any essential way. She marries a man who has exactly the income she had previously identified as a minimal competence. Her reputation is not ruined as a result of her relationship with Willoughby as would surely have been the case in a conventional novel. Moreover, those who behave badly do well: Lucy Steele marries Robert Farrers, Willoughby apparently does well later in life. "The most venal of the cast of characters are the most single-minded, and demonstrate the fact that principle is not always synonimous with virtue. A vision of the essentially anarchic nature of human relationships and the pitfalls in the honest quest for right action becomes, from this novel onwards, Jane Austen's chief fictional concern." 83.

Chapter 4: The Frailties of Fanny

• "In Mansfield Park Austen transforms the late-eighteenth-century conduct novel, making a strong bid for the liberation of fiction from its obligations to provide single, unequivocal moral readings." 111.

• In her letters to Cassandra and Anna, Austen scorned the "pattern females" who appeared as the protagonists in such novels as Clarentine (Sarah Burney 1798), Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (Hannah More 1808), and Self-control (Mary Brunton 1810). "All three novels clearly set out to instruct whilst at the same time entertaining a public hungry for fiction as well as for moral guidance." 84. Austen criticized these novels for portraying "unnatural conduct & forced difficulties" (written of Clarentine) and for the improbabilities in their plots. 84-85. "Contempt for the combined artificiality and didacticism of these novels could hardly be clearer." 85.

• "The [Evangelical] movement was one of the strongest and most obvious features of the reaction to political radicalism in the nineties and continued to be highly influential long after the initial period of war-hysteria." 85. It aimed to revive serious and active Christianity, to recall a decadent clergy to its proper duty, and to achieve a measure of social control through paternalism. Waldron describes Hannah More as a chief instrument of "a very efficient [Evangelical] propaganda machine ... whose publications aimed at driving all levels of society into the proper conduct of their lives." 85. "In all probability Austen's distaste stemmed from the way it set up unreal models of behavior in both polemic and fiction—what she might have called 'cant'." 85. In Waldron's view, "Mansfield Park aims to counteract an increasing tendency for fiction to sermonise through ideal object-lessons." 86.

• Over several pages, Waldron describes the plots and the characterization of the female protagonists of Clarentine, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife and Self-control. 86-88. Austen's "serious project" in Mansfield Park was "to reverse or blur the assumptions manifested in these three novels." 88. Waldron believes that most critics have misunderstood Austen's aims in Mansfield Park by seeing Fanny Price as the same kind of model female as those portrayed in the three novels to which Austen was reacting. In that light, Mansfield Park was a failure because Fanny is not a "perfectly good girl". 88. Reginald Farrer began this line in 1917 with his summation of Mansfield Park: "...alone of her books, Mansfield Park is vitiated throughout by a radical dishonesty...Jane Austen is torn between the theory of what she ought to see, and the fact of what she does see." (quoted at 88.) She quotes Tony Tanner and Isobel Armstrong to similar effect. 88-89. "Commentators who have noticed anomalies in Fanny's behavior, inconsistencies in her representation as the conduct-book ideal have, with few exceptions, seen them as flaws in the perfect carrying out of the author's plan." 89. "If, on the other hand, we see the novel as a working through of the unresolvable conflicts facing a young woman who sets out, on the model of the Evangelical heroines of Burney, More and Brunton, to be wholly and consistently good, the anomalies in Fanny's response to her difficulties can be satisfactorily incorporated in a coherent reading." 89.

• Waldron believes that Cœlebs is most clearly Austen's target in Mansfield Park. 89. "More's novel was intended to demonstrate the strength of family values in the ruling class and its conscientious carrying out of its duties to its dependents." 90. Mansfield Park describes something else: a family of the ruling class (the Bertrams) in which superficial adherence to More's ideals produces a family disaster, in which the parents fail to educate their children properly and the children (Edmund and Fanny partially excepted) lack a well-founded commitment to adapt their behavior to a pious ideal. 90.

• Edmund and Fanny are better educated than the other children at Mansfield Park and much more committed to living the kind of life praised by the Evangelical ideal. Together, they appear at first to embody the moral weight of the narrative. 89. They face a common problem, however: their ideals necessarily imply criticism of the others at Mansfield Park, which under those ideals they cannot express to others and cannot even admit to themselves. "The text asks a difficult question: is refusal to face facts virtuous or not?—and does not provide an answer." 90.

• Mansfield Park contains numerous passages , sometimes of dialog, sometimes internal discourse, in which Fanny's consciousness, through which the narrative is mediated, is strongly divided between what she ought to do and what she wants to do. "Very occasionally a narrator interjects to remind readers that they do not have to think exactly like Fanny, but for the most part we are left with only the intricacies of Fanny's thoughts expressed in free indirect style, or her conversations with others, as guides to whether or not she is living up to her own expectations." 91.

• In his reaction to Mary Crawford, Edmund subverts the Evangelical ideal as expressed in Cœlebs. In Cœlebs, the male protagonist consciously refrains from falling in love with the heroine until he is sure she is worthy. Edmund behaves differently: he is dazzled by Mary Crawford and his feelings require that he distort his principles (and fail to understand that he is doing so) as he learns more about her. 92-93.

• Fanny sees clearly what Edmund is doing but her relationship with him is far too important to her to permit her to risk a breach and so she cannot call him to account. 94.

  [Fanny] has somehow to hang on to her pious principles of grateful submission, while aware that moral chaos is developing around her. The average conduct novel would give her the strength to repress her personal reactions and show everybody how they ought to behave. But Fanny has no such strength: her own feelings run out of control, and she is consequently unable to regulate her behavior according to the Evangelical ideal. Almost every spontaneous feeling she has conflicts with some duty that is part of her code. Disgust with Maria and Julia, dislike of Henry Crawford, disappointment in Edmund, jealousy of Mary all lead her into very reprehensible emotions which she tries hard to disguise, or rather to defuse. 95.

• The episode of the play, Lovers' Vows, illustrates Fanny's moral impotence: she is unable to prevent the others from undertaking a play she knows to be immoral, and waivers in her own principles—she condones Edmund's moral lapse in participating, she talks herself out of her earlier distaste sufficiently to learn most of the play's lines by heart, and she assists Mr. Rushworth in making his cloak. 98.

• All of this is a critique of Evangelical fiction. Austen illustrates "the ease with which unacceptable human feelings can be camouflaged in simplistic moral systems—a useful set of moral imperatives can be used to transform and make laudable such things as jealousy and cold-heartedness." 99.

• After Sir Thomas' return from Antigua and the departure of Maria and Julia, Mary, in need of a confidante, turns to Fanny for a sounding board. A typical Evangelical novel at this point would have the heroine (Fanny) nobly setting aside her own feelings to show compassion and concern and to provide advice that would ease Mary's situation and perhaps help her to find happiness with Edmund. This Fanny cannot do. Fanny cannot get beyond her own feelings and help Mary. 100-101. "This narrative ... is more than hinting that [Fanny] wants Mary to remain bad, and Edmund to find out how bad she is." 101.

• The episode of the ball shows Fanny's grip on her professed moral code slipping further. Her initial reaction to Mary's gift of a necklace is wary and suspicious and her subsequent reaction when Edmund gives her a chain is insensitive and ungrateful—she proposes to return the necklace to Mary because it is "not wanted", then tries to rationalize her behavior by arguing her concern for Mary's best interests. Edmund, shocked, corrects her. 104. When Fanny learns that Mary and Edmund have quarreled over his coming ordination and that Edmund feels that his chances with Mary are ended, Fanny does not share Edmund's pain and disappointment but rather is elated.

  "Though understandable in the circumstances, this is hardly the reaction of an exemplary heroine....Fanny has all of the faults denied by Tanner, and frequently falls into human error. Unlike Belinda, Clarentine, Laura, Lucilla and a host of others, Fanny cannot keep her moral balance sufficiently to become the exemplary woman she would like to be, and the text is asking unequivocally whether this can reasonably be expected. 105.

• Austen continually reminds the reader that Fanny's love for Edmund is the main motive for her continuing rejection of Henry Crawford and her dislike and fear of Mary. Fanny convinces herself that the Crawfords are irredeemably corrupt and therefore can lie to herself that her feelings are independent of her selfish desire to be rid of the Crawfords and have Edmund to herself. The Crawfords are not irredeemably corrupt, however, and Austen holds out the possibility that things might have been very different, and (perhaps) happier for all concerned, if Fanny had been willing to accept (and perhaps redeem) Henry Crawford and if Edmund had been able to marry (and perhaps redeem) Mary Crawford. What is left at the end of te novel is a kind of desolate wasteland at Mansfield Park: the lively members of the family gone (Tom away, Maria, Julia and Mrs. Norris banished), the senior Bertrams alone except for Susan Price, whom Fanny has supplied, and quiet, retiring Edmund and Fanny living on the grounds in the parsonage. 106-110.

• The fact that Austen chose not to cast Fanny as redeemer shows that her aim was to give the lie to Evangelical fictional certainties, which would have allowed a conventional happy ending, involving selfless renunciation on the part of Fanny and varying degrees of reformation in all the others. Such things do not happen; and fiction, Austen thought, though it must invent, should not lie.

Chapter 5: Men of sense and silly wives — the confusions of Mr. Knightley

• Austen's objective in Emma was to create a heroine who (unlike Fanny Price) could not be mistaken by anybody for a conduct book heroine, someone "whom nobody but myself will much like." 112 (Waldron quoting from James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen p. 157) In Emma, Austen combined several familiar stereotypes, including the deluded girl/older mentor and lover, the dependent girl and the model girl and "weaves a fiction of amazing intricacy in which none of the stock characters behaves exactly as might be expected and in which the reader's sympathies are never thrust into a moral coduit." 113.

• The character of Emma is a subverted version of the "deluded heroine" stereotype. Unlike comparable figures in eighteenth century literature, Emma is not personally vain, is rich but is not vulnerable to material indulgence, and does not have parents intent on selling her to the highest bidder. Mrs. Weston and Mrs. Elton appear at first to be versions of the stock "mature companion" figure but Mrs. Weston isn't interested in exercising "guardianship" over Emma and Mrs. Elton, who is interested, is rightly rejected by Emma. Jane Fairfax appears to be the "model fictional girl" until her discreditable secret is revealed, "and Harriet is herself a discreditable secret, though in no way responsible for her position." 113-114, quote 114.

• Knightley is seen by most critics as the "pattern gentleman" carrying the moral authority of the novel and comparable to the character of Sir Charles Grandison and similar characters. Feminist critics such as Kirkham and Johnson reject this view and perceive a roughly equal apportionment of praise and blame between Knightley and Emma. Waldron believes that Kirkham was on the mark "with the difference that I believe that Austen would have repudiated the label of 'Enlightenment feminist' if she had ever heard it. Her main purpose seems to me to have been literary—to produce a critique of fictional figures who control the action of the story because the narrative assumes them to be endowed with special vertù; such figures are as often women as men....Jane Austen seems consciously to reject any assumption of status as value." 114-115.

  ...[N]owhere in the major works do we find a male character who is beyond reproach. 'Pictures of perfection' made her 'sick & wicked'—and not only female ones....[F]ar from being somehow above it all, Mr. Knightley is involved in the same kind of social/moral confusion as Emma and all of the other chaacters and ... it is with general fictional chaos, designed to entertain by confusion rather than by satisfying certainties, that the novel is chiefly concerned. 115.

• Waldron suggests that Emma reflects Austen's reading of Eaton Stannard Barrett's The Heroine, which contains some parallels to the relationship between Emma and Knightley but remained part of the didactic fiction tradition that Austen disliked, and Thomas Gisborne's An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), a popular of the time work on female education. 115-116.

• "The location of the novel is carefully designed to maximise the confusions and mislead readers on the watch for reliable moral lessons." 116. As Austen describes it, the social world of Highbury is extremely fluid. Upwardly mobile nouveaux riches like the Coles and the Westons mix easily with impoverished gentry like the Bateses and the principal local landowner, Knightley, and they are liked and valued for their contributions to local social life. Frank Churchill (like Austen's brother Edward) has been adopted into a higher social stratum than his family of origin, and Jane Fairfax is respected despite her evident limited means. "Generally, the niceties of rank seem to be ignored. One of Emma's delusions is that she can preserve distinctions of rank when nearly everyone around her is determined to dismiss them." 116. This fluidity is best illustrated by Harriet, whose origin is unknown but whose special status appears to be signalled by Mrs. Goddard's recommendation as the novel begins. "Harriet is the extreme example of the doubt about everybody's true social position, the collapsing nature of old ideas about rank, which leads the central characters to fall back, almost unawares, either on unlikely romantic literary stereotypes, or on the reactionary certainties of the conduct books." 117-118, quote 118.

• Knightley is introduced as a "man of sense", but the development of his relationship with Emma over the course of the novel suggests that he is far more complex than this label indicates. "Austen enjoys exploiting the reflexes of her readers, and means to disillusion us." 118. Initially, Knightley is dissatisfied with Emma because she has offended against the conventional ideal. In his conversation with Mrs. Weston, he declares that Emma is too intelligent, she has decided for herself what she ought to do instead of passively accepting the opinions of those (Knightley included) who know better, and she has used her talents to control her social environment and boss everyone else about. 119. Knightley disagrees strongly with Emma's plans for Harriet, and in their argument is emotional and inconsistent while Emma is cool, collected and consistent. 121. Emma has some very rational arguments, based on the ideals promulgated by the conduct books. The argument that most angers him is Emma's description of the general taste of men in choosing their wives: men prefer beauty and good temperament over intelligence and accomplishment. 123. [Waldron suggests that this preference is behind both Knightley's brother's choice of Isabella as a wife (with her "striking inferiorities" to her husband) and Knightley's brother's eventual reservations about Knightley's choice of Emma as a wife. 124-125.] Jane Fairfax provides another topic of disagreement: Knightly criticises Emma because she is not more like Jane and suggests that Emma should cultivate Jane's friendship, while Emma (who would like that friendship) correctly perceives that Jane is unwilling to be intimate and is hiding a secret. 126-127. When Emma subsequently suggests that Jane would be Knightley's perfect partner, he is forced to admit his mistake: "[Jane] has not the open temper which a man would wish for in a wife." 127.

  Here, Knightley has done something quite uncharacteristic of the fictional hero/guardian—he has changed his mind....[Knightley] is saying, in effect, that a stormy relationship with someone he can trust is better than a calm one with someone whose thoughts may be hidden from him. He is inviting Emma to go on saying exactly what she thinks and at least hinting that he will no longer invoke his own superiority to oppose her. 127.

• In the end, Emma and Knightley understand that they have both been wrong, confused, mislead by their own prejudices. Those who see Mr. Kightley as mentor, pure and simple, tend to overlook the enormous development his character undergoes during the course of the novel...in the long run experience teaches him that his attitudes are too rigid, that Emma's intuitions are sometimes better than his 'reasonable' assumptions and that love has litle to do with rules of conduct. 132.

• The novel contains a final ironic plot twist. "While Mr. Knightley tries to escape from the patriarchal/fraternal role, Emma shows every sign of submitting herself in conventional womanly manner to her husband's dominion whether he likes it or not." 132. In Waldron's view, this last development damages the novel's standing as a straightforward feminist tract, as proposed by Kirkham and others, "for we see a woman who has apparently every chance of enjoying an equal relationship wth her husband rejecting it out of hand." 133. However, of the six marriages described in the novel, onlt the arriage of Emma and George Knightley holds the possibility of becomeing a balance of opposing but equal forces rather than the subjection of one personality to another. Knightley's taking up residence at Hartfield shows that he is not at all threatened by the possibility of domination by Emma. "Entertained — and perhaps obliquely instructed — as we have been by their conflicts, we have to hope that Emma and Mr. Knightley quarrel happily ever after — a unique conclusion for a novel of its time." 133-134.

Chapter 6: Rationality and rebellion: 'Persuasion' and the model girl

• Modern criticism views Persuasion as prescriptive and didactic: Anne Elliot is too perfect for modern tastes. Waldron points out the curious fact that contemporary reviews criticized the novel on moral grounds: it was seen as encouraging young people to ignore appropriate moral rules, to "always marry according to their own inclinations and upon their own judgement" because to do otherwise, to be prudent, was to invite years of misery. 135 (quoting review from The British Critic, n. s. 9 (March 1818) 292-301, cited in Southam, Critical Heritage, 84.) According to Waldron, "The five other novels, and the fragments, have all manoeuvered among available stereotypes to find a new way of presenting in fiction the problems of human interaction in life as Austen perceived it, rather than life as it might, according to contemporary conduct-theory, desirably be lived. Persuasion is no exception, but it takes a different direction." 135-136.

• Anne Elliot cannot be faulted on grounds of manners or behavior. She lives up to all of the ideals of the conduct-books, and learns from her own experience that "inflexible adherence to rule and precept does not invariably increase the sum of human happiness and may well do the opposite." 136. Her experience of the failure of traditional "sensible" solutions causes her to rethink her situation from first principles and leaves her feeling an intolerable tension between what she feels is right and what the conduct-books prescribe. 136.

• In her Plan of a Novel, Austen described a heroine very much like Anne Elliot, except for the outcome of her behavior. Persuasion is essentially a critique of the common fictional adventures of that type of heroine. "Fictional 'cant' is still the author's target." 137. In particular, both the Plan and Persuasion are reactions to Fanny Burney's The Wanderer. 137. Burney's novel is a complex examination of social attitudes but in pursuit of her serious purpose Burney presents unlikely characters and situations and uses inflated language and unrealistic dialogue. "In Persuasion, conduct is to be natural, the difficulties will derive predictably from common rather than extraordinary situations, and the outcome will be satisfactory, but quite independent of anyone's deserts." 137-138, quote 138.

• Austen leaves open a final judgment on the ultimate wisdom of Anne's choice to be prudent. As mentioned, contemporaries of the Austens' social standing would have concurred with Lady Russell's advice almost instinctively. A modern reader might not agree but the narrative is not dispositive either way. We can imagine many ways things might have turned out differently if Anne's prudent decision had been otherwise, and other results of her actual prudent decision. Waldron speaks of "Austen's habit of driving the allegiance of readers against the grain of their convictions..." 140.

• Anne's reactions to meeting Wentworth again are dominated not by "rational esteem" as advocated by Lady Russell (and the conduct-books) but by physical passion; Wentworth's touch shakes her to the core. Wentworth is plainly very angry with Anne and exhibits "unscrupulousness and arrogant petulance in his flirtation with the Musgrove daughters." 142. By contemporary standards, Anne ought to disapprove of his behavior and should decide to have nothing more to do with him. 142-143. "But it never crosses her mind. What we are seeing here is not the anxious internal debate about what is right which so often dominates the proceedings in Burney and Edgeworth, for instance, but the unstructured reactions of strong emotions." Anne continues to be in love with Wentworth as she has from almost the beginning of their relationship—this is "the product...of passion, not principle. She simply cannot help herself." 143.

• Waldron spends considerable space (145-148) showing the influences of Byron's poetry on the descriptions of the characters and the plot. She also points out the ways in which the portrayal of William Elliott (Sir Walter's nephew and heir) is influenced by Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son and Others. 148-149.

• Waldron also analyzes the narrative in terms of the gradual re-establishment of communication between Anne and Wentworth, and the difficulties which obtain when the two can have virtually no private time together. The expectations of others prove a great obstacle. 143-144, 150-154.

• In the end, Anne has not found a universal solution to the problem of distinguishing right from wrong. She asserts to Wentworth that she was right to follow Lady Russell's advice, but not based on universal principles—doing so was the right thing for her to do. "'This may be bad morality to conclude with,' says the author at the beginning of the final chapter, speaking in general and directly to the reader about what she saw as the chaotic nature of much human conduct, 'but I believe it to be the truth.'" 156.

Chapter 7: 'Sanditon' — Conclusion

• Sanditon in its incomplete state evidences "the twin targets of Austen's irony — 'cant' and contemporary attitudes to literature." 157. Modern critics have argued that Sanditon represents a new departure for Austen in its setting in a seaside resort. Waldron to the contrary sees the embryo resort as very similar to the preferred settings of her other novels: three or four families in a country village. 158-159. Other critics have suggested that Sanditon is more concerned with topography than Austen's other novels. This must be rejected, as all of her novels are concerned with the details of physical setting as an essential ingredient in psychological analysis. "Practically all the determining events occur out of doors in very vividly identifiable locations...." 159-160, quote 160. "In fact, the fragment shows every sign of not departing from, but probing deeper into, the exploration of human motive and desire, with a special emphasis on self-deception, which has been the business of the other novels." 162.

• Yet other critics have claimed that Sanditon expresses concern about a transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism.

  "This is not tenable, chiefly on the grounds that it cannot be deduced from the texts of this or the other novels that Austen had any notion of a break in the history of literature at this stage. She was not versed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary categories. What Austen is identifying in this fragment is not evidence of decadence on the literary scene, but the spouting of unexamined opinion — 'cant'.

• As we have it, Sanditon provides plenty of scope for the characters' false assumptions and unexpected revelations, arising from ordinary situations and out of a construct of reality based on the characters' views of the world. "We may not be able to guess how Sanditon continued and concluded, but we can confidently assume that the dispersal of attention which is characteristic of the other novels would have left the significance of the action open to the reader's ingenuity, with the narrator standing at the margins, rarely, if ever, giving any direction." 165. Austen's refusal to give a moral lead, her decision to present human interaction in an untendentious way that invites a number of different reader reactions, gave fiction a new dimension, bringing it much closer to drama, with this important difference — the addition of internal monologue (free indirect style) creates a potential for the novel, arising from the reader's access to the inner life of the characters, that drama will always lack. "Nothing like this had been done before." 165.

• This leads to the question of Austen's influence on her successors. Her influence was not direct — the nineteenth century novel builds directly on the picaresque novel and the Gothic, not her principal modes. However, "There is no doubt that during this phase of its development the novel gradually acquired an immensely increased psychological range; both 'good' and 'bad' characters are portrayed with more subtleties and contradictions; what Johnson had objected to in the 'mixed' character became the norm. It was this analytical approach which above all set the nineteenth-century novel apart from its many eighteenth-century forebears, and Jane Austen stands at the point of change." 166.

Wiltshire (JA and the Body)

Wiltshire—Jane Austen and the Body

___________

Introduction: Jane Austen and the Body

• Wiltshire begins with a brief summary of the history of Austen criticism that demonstrates the received opinion of her works—from a general belief that her novels are concerned with "moral adjudication" and therefore transcend the natural, to the hostile reaction of Charlotte Bronte, who complained that "what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores." [Qtd. 2] Austen's novels are set in a polite society in which the discussion of matters of the body was restricted for both men, and especially, women. pp. [1] Critics like Marilyn Butler, D. D. Devlin, Claudia Johnson and Alistair Duckworth have argued, from various viewpoints, her immersion in the political controversies of her day. More recent feminist criticism has tended to emphasize the subversive nature of her irony and the focus of her work on women's relation to patriarchal structures and authority. [3-4]

• Wiltshire believes that his work intersects that of Mary Poovey and Claudia Johnson "on the restrictions upon the open expression of female energy and desire in the novels of Austen and her contemporaries". [4] W. is concerned to show the ways that restricted desire and energy "is represented as doubling back and displaced into women's bodies" and figure "as illness or as attendance upon illness". [4]

• Austen's works are full of references to sickness and ill health. Sometimes, these seem simply a method of establishing realism of scene. At other times, Austen makes use of these events to illustrate moral character and to further her plots. Mrs. Bennet's insistence that Jane Bennet ride in the rain to Netherfield in order to promote a relationship with Bingley illustrates Mrs. Bennet's single-minded, almost reckless focus on her daughters' marriage prospects, and also enables Elizabeth Bennet to pay a call at Netherfield. [5]

• In the novels, talk about health is "one way in which a community is constituted." [6] Paying attention to the health or symptoms of others makes connections and helps bind the members of the community together. [6] "It falls upon women, most notably, to heal, or at least to camouflage, the divisions that social and economic determinants inscribe upon their world." [7] Inquiries about health also serve to hide the operation of social and gender politics. Much of the comedy and irony in the mature novels derives from differences "between a character's experience in and of the body and others' readings of it", [7] or between actual suffering and "the feigned sensibility of fashionable currency." [7-8]

• Austen's works may be distinguished from the realist tradition in their treatment of illness and health. In the realist tradition, good health is taken for granted, as part of the invisible background, and characters who are ill, or injured, or deformed, become prominently visible for that reason. [8] In Austen's works, the issue of health is in the foreground—Emma's good health, Mr. Woodhouse's hypochondria, Fanny Price's "physical insecurity." [8-9] Health (good or bad) is an important part of the characterization of many of Austen's principal characters, and beginning with Mansfield Park becomes a critical element in the unfolding of her plots. [9] For a woman, health is a commodity, making a woman more or less appealing to the patriarchal male gaze (citing John Dashwood's comments on Marianne's "marketability" before and after her illness). [9-10] The novels also examine the "relationship of bodily preoccupation to the absence of productive work" (citing Emma's father and Sir Walter Elliott). [10] "I am suggesting then that the body becomes most visible in Austen's novels not in the framework solely of desire, but in the larger framework of health and illness." [10].

• Wiltshire discusses the distinction made by medical theorists between the concepts of "illness" and "disease." When a person becomes sick, he/she experiences "illness" and defines what is wrong "according to the norms and terms available within [their] culture and social network." [11] Visiting a doctor or other medical professional, the sufferer becomes a "patient" and the illness is "recognized" a specific "disease" within professionally recognized categories, which "make sense" of the various "symptoms." Wiltshire suggests that "disease functions very much like a male category—stable, defined, inserted into a nosological framework, written up in the case records; and illness like a female one—unstable, fluid, disregarded because unvalidated within culture, unformulated, unwritten." [11] Wiltshire cites Arthur Kleinman (a medical theorist) and Susan Sontag for the proposition that the meaning of "illness" is culturally determined. "Far from being transhistorical and transcultural, as the premises of biomedicine have it, illness is experienced and may even be produced differently in different social settings." [12] Kleinman suggests that "illness" should be thought of as a language, and the body (upon which "illness" is inscribed) as a means of social expression. [13] (Wiltshire cites the example of Jane Fairfax after her quarrel with Frank Churchill, who suffers from severe headaches and "nervous fever". Her distress is communicated physically because the overt expression of her feelings is forbidden.) [13-14] "By locating the origin of distress within the body,...and by naming it...as a disease, typical patients can avoid impugning the social system or the local network of support or facilitation in which they are suspended. Their illness may express a disguised political criticism, but it is thought of as organic, non-cultural, independent of their life-world." [14]

• Contemporary feminism offers a second way of "theorizing the body." [14] "[T]o simplify the issue drastically—one could say that most discussion of the body in contemporary feminism is regulated by sexuality, and that sexuality is always already installed in the discourse" to the exclusion (in many cases) of other issues regarding the body. [15]

"On the other hand, sexuality was as far as possible not brought into play in the advocacies of eighteen century feminism. . . For early feminists, like Wollstonecraft, the starting point was that women are, as Elizabeth insists and as Mrs. Croft too berates her brother Frederick Wentworth for forgetting, 'rational creatures'. The body, as was common in the rationalistic tradition, was silenced—the neutral background of the sexually indifferent 'creature'—what mattered was women's participation in, and access to universal rights and a universal reason. To treat women as 'elegant females' or as 'fine ladies', as distinct by virtue of their sex, was to justify oppression under the cover of estime and solicitude." [15] Just as the medical profession normally views itself as dealing with "disease" while the question of sexuality is set aside, in much contemporary feminism "[t]he body is sexually saturated" [16] and "mortality is suspended—that is part of its exhilarating quality, no doubt: the implied female subject in such writing is young, bold and free, menstruates regularly and without discomfort, never suffers from lower back pain or ulcers, and not even her reading of Derrida and Lacan can give her a headache." [16]

• Viewing Austen's novels through the lens of "illness" illuminates power relationships. Illness can result from a lack of power (Jane Fairfax) but also can confer power (. Woodhouse). "The very indefinability of illness is the source of its potency, its infinite usefulness as a vehicle of covert manipulations." [19-20] A person who complains of illness demands that those close to him/her be sympathetic, be understanding of foibles, or even provide direct (nursing) assistance. "If the ill person has access to other sources of power [such as age or wealth] then illness becomes a mode of compulsion" [20]—in Emma, Mrs. Churchill uses her "illness" to control her husband and son, and they have so internalized acceptance of "illness" as legitimate that they obey willingly. [20] In the powerless, "illness or debility, or merely physical weakness may function in a parallel way, to gain a minimal social leverage, consideration or opportunities otherwise denied. Austen has nothing—or almost nothing—to disclose about the phenomenology of illness, but about its performance, about illness appropriation, the novels say a good deal." [20]

• Mrs. Bennet's complaints about her "poor nerves" represent her appropriation of a newly developing way of presenting the self. "Her nerves (to take them seriously for a moment–no one else does) thus function in two ways—as real distress, the result of anger, humiliation and powerlessness—and as modes of recuperation–an attempt to rescue herself as a centre of attention, if not of actual authority." [20] "The proliferation of 'nervous' disorders at the end of the eighteenth century . . . is the result not only of developments in the history of physiological experiment, but of related developments in the history of individualism and self-consciousness." [21] "Middle class" British society in Austen's time placed a premium on outward decorum, manners, and the limitation of emotional distress to "private" life. [21] "Austen's novels themselves are part of the process whereby individualism and individual consciousness became valued and dominant." [22] (Wiltshire cites Austen's "virtual invention" of free indirect speech as a means of representing internal processes.) [22] In Austen's novels, the reader is aware that a character is suffering psychological stress or disturbance, but the other characters are aware only of physical symptoms and complaints. "There is thus a continuing tension and interplay in Jane Austen's fiction between society's attention to the body and the dramas of interpersonal tension that use the body as their vehicle." [22]

• One way in which Austen framed her interest in morality and the imagination was through her description of how these were "enacted in and by the body", [22] in her portrayals of invalids and hypochondriacs and, more subtly, of "the facilities of care and attentiveness that make up in fact a large part of what we understand by a community." [22] This is also reflected in her continuing criticism of the culture of sensibility which, in Sanditon, reaches its culmination in "the institution of invalidism." [23]

Chapter One: Sense, sensibility and the proofs of affection

• While Sense and Sensibility is usually viewed as a comparison of the two Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, Wiltshire suggests that they are members of a family triangle of which Mrs. Dashwood is also a part. Mrs. Dashwood contributes frequently to the "conversation" between the two sisters and is responsible for the psychological dynamics that produced the two sisters' different personalities and attitudes. [25] Mrs. Dashwood clearly identifies with Marianne, and offers Marianne a kind of sisterly relationship of support and confidence. As a result, Elinor must assume the "adult" role in the family, as money manager, source of wisdom and prudence, compromiser and nag. Elinor's assumption of this "masculine" role in the family enables both Marianne and their mother "to become the free champions of spontaneous feeling." [26] Also as a result, Marianne's dependence on her mother inhibits her social adjustment, her growth into adulthood, and is eventually a contributor to Marianne's illness. [29]

• "Elinor's...literary father is Dr. Johnson. She often speaks in measured, stilted prose that reminds one of the eighteenth-century moral essay." [26-27] (W. goes on to draw an analogy between Elinor and the character of Imlac in Johnson's Rasselas.) [27]

• "Marianne is the bearer of romantic theories of the self, a believer in intuition, in the innate moral sense, in the natural goodness of the human soul. More importantly, her ideology is bound to her bodily intensity....Sensibility as presented in Marianne is both an ideology and a physical condition" embodied in her physical warmth and passion, her good health, her spirited nature, her impulsiveness and and quickness to respond. [30-31] The vivid description of her character "is transmitted through her bodily reactions... [her] inner life is communicated in instantly readable physical signs". [34]

• Contracts and covenants, their presence and binding nature (or not), are an important theme of the novel. Prudence requires that "the transactions of feeling" be reduced to writing and thereby made public and binding. [31] Old Mr. Dashwood on his deathbed makes his son John promise to take care of his half-sisters, but John Dashwood can be talked out of honoring his promise by Fanny in part because the promise was not in writing (Mr. Dashwood left no will), was only a "moral" obligation. [32] "There are lovers' contracts, too, but these are labile, misleading, inhabiting a space somewhere between the legal and the sentimental worlds." [32] Marianne and her mother understand that there is a tacit engagement between Marianne and Willoughby. When Elinor questions this, "[they] need no such formally spoken words—they rest their faith on intuitive understanding. Looks and gestures are, for them, guarantees, and body language constitutes a direct avenue to the unlying 'heart' of another. Elinor, on the other hand, requires spoken language: she requires, at least for others, that feelings be brought into the symbolic system, be articulated into contracts." [33-34]

• In contrast to Marianne and their mother, Elinor "seeks to keep up appearances", [36] to suppress the outward display of her feelings, and desires that Marianne do likewise. In the face of Marianne's disastrous involvement with Willoughby and the shock of Edward's engagement to Lucy Ferrars, she struggles to maintain the appearance of good spirits and proper behavior, through what "is essentially a discipline of physiological control, exerted over her own face and body." [36]

• S & S offers a divergent view of Marianne's physical expressiveness, first as a cultural product of the cult of sensibility, and second as a part of her physical nature, "which may indeed be supported by a currently fashionable code, but which is intrinsically hers," [37] a reflection of her youth, her enthusiasm and her impulsiveness. Austen uses the word "sensibility" to cover both and doesn't really resolve the difference between the two meanings. [37-38]

• Wiltshire views the receipt by Marianne of Willoughby's letter denying his love for her and returning the lock of her hair he had kept as the crucial moment in Marianne's story. He draws a parallel with the use of forged letters as a device in Clarissa and Evelina. [38-39] Wiltshire asserts that Marianne is made dangerously ill in the aftermath of this letter not just by disappointed love, but because the letter undermines "the moral foundations of her world", [40] her belief (and her mother's) "that there is an unfalsifiable bond between bodily signs and emotional commitment." [40] Marianne is sure (and ironically is correct) that Willoughby didn't write the letter, even if it is in his handwriting. [40] She experiences an "intolerable psychological conflict" [41] and can react only as she does, by falling ill. [40-43] "Her illness, and the carelessness of herself that makes part of it, form, of course, an indirect protest at the exchange of women, the market which determines women's 'value' in the patriarchal system for which John Dashwood is here the spokesman." [42]

• Wiltshire cites Jocelyn Harris for the idea that Marianne is linked to another betrayed heroine, Clarissa Harlowe, through the story of the two Elizas told by Colonel Brandon. Marianne is not actually "ruined" by Willoughby, but in the details of her story and her reaction it is as though she had been. [43-44] However, Austen "rethinks the convention of the young heroine as a victim, both of male vice and her own femaleness," [45] in at least two ways. First, Marianne's illness is different from Clarissa's. It is not just "the generalized sickness of exacerbated sensibility" [45] but is also due to Marianne's specific failure to take care of herself ("her wilful wandering about the grounds of Cleveland in the long wet grass"). [45] "Austen does not accept the ideological premise that excessive sensibility, acting through the body's heightened vulnerability, can of itself bring about destruction." [46] Second, Marianne recovers from her illness, which of course Clarissa did not. As she recovers, Marianne admits her past mistakes, using language similar to that characteristic of Elinor, but does so with an intensity and exaggeration still characteristic of her personality. [49-50] "Thus, at the moment when Marianne is confessing her misconduct, she is also expressing the very intensity of her nature—the very eagerness of her desire to live—which makes her reform a new enactment of her embodied self, not the assumption of an Elinor-like sobriety." [50]

• Willoughby's confession to Elinor that he did not in fact write the letter that devastated Marianne undermines (deliberately) "the sovereignty of sense." [50] This scene vindicates Marianne's earlier faith in Willoughby's feelings and supports her ideological belief that "there is a language of the body which cannot lie." [51] Moreover, Elinor is forced by her attraction to Willoughby during this encounter to acknowledge that "'reason' somehow does not seem to have quite the force she has been used to attribute to it." [51]

• The limited comedy in S & S addresses issues that will appear in her later novels. Among them is the problem of appropriate response, the idea that care of the body is offered by well-meaning people when what is needed is care of the spirit (citing Mrs. Jennings). People comfort themselves by attending to physical symptoms while passing by the more disturbing problems posed by emotional pain. [52-53] At the same time, Austen appreciates "what is genuine and valuable in such communal attentiveness." [53] In Austen's novels, "[k]indheartedness and moral obtuseness are so often linked." 53] Another is the exercise of power through illness. When Fanny Dashwood hears of Edward Ferrar's secret engagement to Lucy Steele, she falls into violent hysterics immediately, requiring the attendance of the apothecary and solicitous inquiries from her friends. [54] "Because of their social position such women can force others to attend to as a sickness what is a manifestation of snobbery and greed...." [54]

• The most difficult question posed by S & S (and the later novels) is the relationship of bodily appearance to moral worth. [55] In S & S, the relationship is fairly direct, as can be seen in the initial descriptions of Fanny Dashwood and Sir John Middleton. [55-56] "Jane Austen never, I think, permits herself so unquestioning a use of physiology as moral character in her later work as here, but she is nevertheless continually teased by the evident plausibility of the equivalence, the germ of truth in what might be a vulgar and reactive assessment." [56]

• In reflecting on what might have brought Mr. and Mrs, Palmer together, Elinor thinks of "some unaccountable bias in favor of beauty" which caused a sensible man to choose a silly woman for a wife. [Qtd. 57] Austen's novels often present the results of such "unaccountable choices": Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, Sir Walter and Lady Elliott. "Unaccountable bias" here represents sexual power, the physical attraction of one body to another, "everything that cannot be said about the relations between men and women." [57] Marianne's sensitivity, enthusiasm and impulsiveness suggest in her a heightened sexuality. "But if sexuality is at the heart of the book, it is a sexuality that is necessarily censored, or screened. It is plain that the energy that circulates in the novel is sexual, but also that explicit acknowledgment of this is avoided." [58]

• Marianne's ultimate fate—wife of Colonel Brandon—is yet another instance of the close (and unhealthy?) relationship between Marianne and her mother. It is Mrs. Dashwood who decides for herself that Brandon is the man for Marianne, and pushes Marianne into the match. [59] Wiltshire describes Marianne as being handed over to Colonel Brandon as a "reward," feeling "no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship," [59] and therefore as much a victim of family politics at her mother's hands as she would have been had John Dashwood been the family patriarch. [59-60]

• "[O]ne might suggest, finally, that Sense and Sensibility is a novel pervaded by forms of female homosocial desire." [60] Wiltshire argues that the relationship between Elinor and Edward Ferrars as portrayed in the novel is "a poor thing, emotionally and representationally" when compared with the intense interactions between Elinor and Lucy Steele, her rival. [60] "In this novel the repartee between potential lovers that makes Pride and Prejudice so exhilarating is displaced into contests of wit and cunning between sisters and rivals, between women." [60]

Chapter Two: Eloquent blood: the coming out of Fanny Price

• Fanny Price is the only one of Austen's heroines whose body is described as frail, debilitated or enfeebled. She is also the only heroine whose childhood is described in detail. Her early history is one of parental neglect, her only close relationship with her older brother. "Her inferiority, both physical and sexual, seems indelibly inscribed in her (weak, feminine) body." p. 64. Similarly, at Mansfield Park, her small size and lack of vigor, compared with her cousins, are an outward and visible sign of her subordinate social and moral status. pp. 62-64.

• At Mansfield Park, Fanny forms an attachment with Edmund (a replacement for her brother), who treats her as a younger sister and supports her when the others will not. Her attachment to Edmund is intense and clinging because, based on her past, she can never be sure he will not betray her—and one reading of the novel is as the unfolding of such a betrayal. "Fanny's love for Edmund—a love that is tenacious, possessive and funded by primary psychological urgencies—shapes the novel, but...has rarely met with answering attention from readers."

• The novel shows Fanny's affection for and gratitude to Edmund maturing into adult and sexual passion. As such, it becomes unspeakable. Fanny has been taught from the moment she arrived at Mansfield Park that she is an outsider. To love Edmund, to marry Edmund is to transgress the fundamental social code of the world in which she lives. She also must remain silent because Edmund loves Fanny only as a brother, and a closer, passionate and sexual relationship would feel like a transgression of the rules against incest. In spite of Fanny's internalization of these codes and rules, her need for Edmund is "vehement" (the term Whately used in his review). "In these circumstances, Fanny's desire, unable to be communicated in words, is expressed, experienced within and displayed covertly upon her body." pp. 66-67.

• Fanny 's feelings for Edmund are first disclosed as sexual through her jealousy of Mary Crawford, whom Edmund teaches to ride on the horse he has previously allowed Fanny to use. Fanny's internal taboo is so strong that the feeling can barely be admitted to her consciousness. She recognizes that there is something wrong about the emotion she feels and attempts to avoid the emotion by rationalizing it away. Fanny begins to repress her feelings and to present herself falsely to those around her. Her physical appearance to others—shrinking and creeping, quiet, in the background—is a reflection of her untenable position: alienation from her family of birth, inferior social status of which she is constantly reminded, a love that is taboo, impermissible emotions such as rage, jealousy, and envy, and her own feelings of guilt about them. pp. 68-73.

• Fanny's feelings are not articulated, even to herself. Instead, they are made manifest through certain bodily signs: headaches, weariness, trembling and blushing. Wiltshire goes off on a riff against the Western rationalist tradition, exemplified by Marilyn Butler (he says), which rejects this evidence of the body as a failed attempt to generate sympathy for Fanny. He presents an extended discussion of the significance of blushing in the novel. pp. 76-83.

• Fanny is not the model of integrity and principle some have believed. In refusing Henry Crawford, her unspoken love for Edmund motivates her conduct, not her rectitude. In fact, as the story progresses, Fanny consciously undertakes to "act" contrary to her deepest feelings. Edmund notices weariness and distress in her face, but this is due to the effort required of Fanny to disguise and misrepresent her feelings and motives. pp. 84-85.

• Wiltshire criticizes the critical views of both Trilling and Gilbert and Gubar. Trilling described a heroine who epitomized stillness and withdrawal, who suffered under the handicap of a weak, debilitated body but who had a high-principled, undeviatingly righteous soul. Gilbert and Gubar complain about Fanny's "invalid passivity" and compare her to Snow White in her passivity, her immobility, and her pale purity. Both readings miss the novel's detailed descriptions of Fanny's bodily states. "If you obliterate Fanny's desire, you cannot understand her 'invalidism,' which is her desire, thwarted and concealed, expressing itself through her body." pp. 85-86.

• Some feminist critics (e.g., Nina Auerbach) detest Fanny because she refuses the chance to be a feminist heroine. Fanny starts well: in refusing to marry Henry, she defies the assembled might of the patriarchy, she vindicates steadfastly female desire even as she feels it to be subversive, "and the writing in which she is made palpable employs bodily signs, rhythm and silence as modes of subversion. Fanny fails as a feminist, however, because she chooses to support the patriarchal values that oppress her. pp. 88, 94.

• Mrs. Norris is completely dependent on her sister (Lady Bertram) and Sir Thomas and this dependency leaves her enraged and frustrated. This is a rage which cannot be shown. It is masked behind professions of faithful service in the name of the family and various forms of self-punishment:self-deprivation, parsimony. Mrs. Norris exercises an almost patriarchal power over the servants, and attempts to exercise similar power over Fanny. pp. 89-92. "'The lessons she [Mrs. Norris] prescribes [to Fanny] all project onto her little niece the worthlessness, inferiority and indebtedness she is so anxious to deny in herself.' [p. 92. Wiltshire here quotes Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Chicago, 1984, p. 206.] Fanny becomes the scapegoat upon whom Mrs. Norris can exercise her frustrations and baffled energies: Fanny is humiliated and punished, made to fetch and carry, scolded and victimised, deprived of heat in the East room, so that Mrs. Norris can momentarily appease her own sense of functionless dependence, and reaffirm the strictness of the social hierarchy which gives meaning to her life." Wiltshire draws a parallel between Fanny's blushing as a display of hidden and forbidden emotion and those occasions when Mrs. Norris is described as "reddening" in reaction to some perceived slight or personal injustice. Behind this reddening is " a rage for which propriety and social arrangements allow but a bodily and passive outlet." p. 92.

• After the first volume, MP focuses increasingly on "the self-communings and meditations of Fanny Price. Moving away from the ensemble scenes of the first volume the essential drama of the second and third comes to reside in the isolated anxieties of the heroine." p. 92. Fanny's struggle with her desire for Edmund is most clearly expressed in the second volume when, just before the ball, Edmund gives Fanny the chain and implies during their conversation that he has decided to ask Mary Crawford to marry him. "Fanny experiences her [intensely jealous] reaction as a corporeal sensation...." p. 93. The passage repeats the phrase "it was s stab" in describing (in Fanny's internal voice) her feelings. p. 93. Fanny reacts by attempting to convince herself that she must ignore her own feelings. "Fanny has learned from the patriarchy...that the object of her desires is taboo: as soon as the desire emerges into consciousness it is regarded with dismay....Fanny wishes not only to behave, to act, but to feel, and even to imagine, as she has been directed....But that is not all that this dramatic representation of Fanny's thoughts divulges. Fanny is telling herself and telling herself vehemently what her social position is, and what she may or may not think and desire: but the vehemence itself is the rebellious or libidinal element seeking its displaced expression." p. 94. Fanny now understands her feelings for Edmund. "Much as she is ashamed of her feelings, they make up henceforth part of her conscience, and their location (not beyond the pale) is revealed, and kept before the reader in those occasions, continually contrived by the author, when she blushes." p. 95. While some critics have criticized Fanny's "passivity," they fail to understand that her inhibitions are "the central constituents of her psychological and moral self...." p. 95. "Despite appearances, Fanny is not a weak or depressive personality: she certainly is ashamed of her derelictions from what Sir Thomas might wish of her, but she does not repudiate her inconvenient feelings...." p. 96.

• Fanny "comes out" at a ball given in her honor by the Bertrams, but the social ritual—"a gendering ritual that designates the girl's maturing into a woman, a ceremony that presents her upon the stage of the patriarchy as marriageable, and marriageable within the network of family and political alliances ('connections') that makes up society"—is only a minor theme in the novel. p. 98. Wiltshire compares Austen's evident disdain for the ritual (her reference to "the trade of coming out") with Mary Wollstonecraft's similar comments in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]. pp. 100-101. The ball does not in fact make Fanny's "entry into the world. After the ball, Fanny continues her old behavior: shy, few words spoken inaudibly, averted face. After the ball and her refusal of Henry Crawford's proposal, Fanny is shipped off to Portsmouth where she is left hanging, reading news of Edmund's continued courtship of Mary Crawford. Only when she is recalled to Mansfield Park to meet the needs of the elder Bertrams in the face of Tom's illness and Maria's elopement can Fanny begin to display a more normal adult orientation toward and mastery of the world around her. pp. 101-106.

• Fanny is the bearer of the novel's key values but is not (contra Duckworth) the "inheritor" of Mansfield Park or "the guardian of a debased heritage." A reformed Tom Bertram, chastened by his illness, fills those roles, and it is his reform (which occurs independently of Fanny's story) that is critical to Fanny's restoration to Mansfield Park and her eventual place in it. It is not Fanny's devotion to duty that ensures the estate's actual reform, prosperity or improvement, but Tom's. pp. 106-107.

Chapter Three: Emma: the picture of health

• Wiltshire begins with Mr. Perry, the apothecary. Following J. R. Watson, "Mr. Perry's Patients: a view of Emma, Essays in Criticism, 20, 1970, 334-43, Wiltshire points to Mr. Perry, a character who never actually appears in the novel but is predominant in the middle background and helps provide the sense of profound social depth Austen gives us in the novel. "He is omnipresent and very active, but scarcely seen, cloistered with Mr. Woodhouse whilst the drama goes on elsewhere, or glimpsed occasionally as he rides about the village...implied but not presented. Most often he is reported on indirectly, through two or even three intermediaries...." p. 110. "Mr. Perry is a nodal point, not only as a relay-station of gossip, but as a key reference in the distinctive sociolect of Highbury, a speech idiom which, taking its cue from Mr. Woodhouse, is much concerned with discussion of and enquiries about sickness and health." pp. 111-112. Highbury interprets Mr. Perry's purchase of a carriage not as a sign of his prosperity or social standing but as a sign of illness. "Economic relations and social determinants are thus displaced or partially concealed by their redefinition as matters of health. By redefining social (and gender) relations wholly as a language of the body ... Highbury remains oblivious to the political and social structures that are actually organizing its world." p. 112.

• In Emma, everyone in Highbury is presented as a sufferer from ill health. "The novel is littered too with para-medical paraphernalia and talk..." p. 112. Sometimes this is simply used as a device to move the plot along, or to provide "some mild and traditional comedy at the expense of the hypochondriac." p. 114. However, Watson suggested that the nature of certain characters is established by portraying the ways they react to illness in others, the degree of kindness and understanding they show. "The theme of health enables Jane Austen to bring out serious issues in the comic mode, he argues, particularly in revealing Emma's continuous self-abnegation in the face of her father's relentless demands." pp. 114-115. Highbury's "medicalized sociolect" takes the body as the key to understanding, or at least communicating with, the person. Caring about others is expressed, sometimes counterproductively, as concern for the minor stresses of their physical existence. p. 116.

• The novel presents a gallery of characters who suffer from so-called nervous disorders, the two most important of whom are Mr. Woodhouse and (in absentia) Mrs. Churchill. "[T]hey preside, one way or another, over the novel's action." p. 117. [Wiltshire presents an interesting discussion (pp. 117-120) of contemporary theory of nervous disease, citing most interestingly George Cheyne's The English Malady [!] or a Treatise of Nervous Disorders of all Kinds (1733), a popular text book of the time.] Mrs. Churchill and Mr. Woodhouse are in fact covert doubles: each is elderly and rich, each uses his or her illness to keep her/his child at home and to prevent him/her from marrying. Her distant power over Highbury (her demands for attention provoke the most important plot developments in the novel) is paralleled by his local power: he is consulted in everything, his welfare and whims are everyone's primary concern. Mr. Woodhouse is apparently liked while Mrs. Churchill is not, but the hidden parallel between the two suggests (quietly) the power relations in Highbury: Mr. Woodhouse is the patriarchal authority and exercises his power over Emma's life in his own (selfish) interests. pp. 123-124. "'His habits of gentle selfishness' are selfishness nonetheless; and though he is well-meaning and charitably disposed, it is scarcely possible not to notice that all the real good, all the active charity in the novel, is Emma's and Knightley's, and that a good deal of Emma's involves overriding her father's wishes." p. 124. Mr. Woodhouse in his mode of living denies almost all bodily activity and almost all bodily enjoyment. "He does not like to be reminded of the body's demands and appetites." p. 126. Wiltshire quotes Avram Fleishman'ssuggestion that Mr. Woodhouse in not merely a hypochondriac but suffering from premature senility with associated acute anxiety. p. 125.

• Of the qualities of Emma that enable her to deal with her father successfully—independence, imagination, resourcefulness, initiative, spirit—the most reliable and the most characteristic is "spirit," a word that Austen uses over and over in various forms to describe her. "Spirit" is a morally neutral term, but spirits reveal their positive value as they enable Emma to deal with her father and remain an autonomous being. p. 128. "In the cluster of meanings most germane to Austen's use in Emma (though other overtones are not excluded), the word seems to suggest a bridging or holistic conflation of the physical and the mental, for the mental alacrity it sometimes celebrates runs quickly into physical energy and activity, and 'good spirits' can hardly be thought of except against a background of bodily well-being." p. 129. Jane Austen's lifetime was the period in which the use of the term "spirit" in outmoded Galenic physiology was fading in favor of its reconception as an essential part of the emotional self. pp. 129-130. Critics have tended to focus narrowly on Emma as a (successful or unsuccessful) moral agent but this misses a large part of her character. Emma is physically beautiful, active, engaging and attractive. In a conversation with George Knightley, Mrs. Weston praises Emma's regular features, open countenance, and "bloom of full health." "There is health not merely in her bloom, but in her air, her head, her glance. One hears sometimes of a child being 'the picture of health;' now Emma always gives me the idea of being the complete picture of grown-up health." p. 133. "As far as Mrs. Weston is concerned, she is health, and health is realized in her beauty. What—in the largest sense—health is, is to be known in...what I have called her spirit...." p. 134.

• Mrs. Weston's comments connect Emma's attractiveness to that of a child. While Austen's novels often dismiss children and their doting parents with some acerbity, in Emma Mr. Perry's brood, John Knightley's boys and Mrs. Weston's pregnancy are important signifiers of vitality and normal healthy growth. p. 135.

• Jane Fairfax is the shadowy counterpart to the heroine. Her beauty does not signify health and vitality. Because her reserve and her need to preserve her secret relationship with Frank deny the reader access to her inner life, the reader must make do with her "look," the appearance of her body, which can convey ill-health to some observers and beauty to others. pp. 135-136. As the story progresses, Jane's slow physical collapse is related to the stress of holding her engagement a secret, and Frank's abysmal behavior toward her in flirting openly with Emma. Jane breaks her engagement with Frank, accepts a governess position she does not want and falls ill. Wiltshire points out that Miss Bates regards Jane's illness as purely physical, not related to the governess position, and by doing so ignores the real causes in the interest of preserving her favorable view of Mrs. Elton, who has pressed Jane relentlessly to take the position. p. 137-141. "In Jane Fairfax's position, the direct and overt expression of her distressed motion is forbidden. Her symptoms express not only her immediate situation, but focus, too, the larger social condition of the single disempowered woman." Mr. Perry is the only one who seems to understand that Jane's illness is a manifestation of social stress. p. 142.

• Eventually, Emma comes (briefly) to suffer her own case of "nerves." Emma learns that Harriet has become interested in George Knightley and believes he is interested in her, and Emma discovers her own feelings for Knightly. But Knightley is away in London and Emma is alone with her father, isolated and unable to discover whether Harriet is correct. Her situation replicates in miniature Jane Fairfax's long period of loneliness and isolation. It is quickly resolved: Mr. Perry comes for a visit with his patient and friend, and Emma escapes to the garden, there to meet Knightly (returned from London) and eventually to receive and accept his proposal. pp. 142-145.

• Highbury is a community preoccupied with ill-health. Emma is an investigation of the various meanings of "health." The term is defined by Georges Canguilhem as the capacity to respond to changes. "Emma would not be Emma without her capacity for mistakes, her capacity to transgress and recover, and it is this which makes her embody that health which is the keystone of the novel's structure." pp. 150-152 (quote 151-152) The novel presents a series of enclosed environments, often defined by illness (the lives of Mr. Woodhouse, Jane Fairfax, the Bates), which themselves signify diminished vitality. It is Emma's capacity to break out of the boundaries enclosing these environments that is her real triumph.pp. 152-153.

Persuasion: The pathology of everyday life

• If Emma is the picture of health, Anne Elliott is a portrait of suffering. Her loss and her grief are set within losses of many kinds: deaths (Fanny Harville), health(Mrs. Smith), hopes, home (the move to Bath). It is generally agreed that loss and adjustment to loss is a major theme of the novel. pp. 155-157.

• Some critics (Monaghan, Poovey, Tony Tanner) have argued that the story reflects a new view by Austen of the gentry in spiritual and financial collapse as a class. This is not convincing. Austen did not change her entire view of the world in the five months separating the completion of Emma and the beginning of the composition of Persuasion. Sir Walter is not abandoning his ancestral estate, only taking a traditional and necessary action to preserve it. The navy men are not members of a new rising class about to supplant the gentry because they are of the gentry. Austen describes the Musgroves with irony, but it is a respectful irony: the Musgrove for all their flaws are solid country folk, the backbone of rural society. pp. 157-159. Wiltshire believes that these views have become critically fashionable because of a sort of embarrassment:

"It is as if to vindicate or explain Jane Austen's status as a canonical or classic author it was necessary to make her into a social theorist, to make Austen prophesy the downfall of the class to which she belonged, or attribute to her, if not a radical politics, at least a 'radical' rethinking of her techniques." p. 159.

• As a city, Bath was designed to separate the gentry from the natural world and from the lower classes who were necessary to its existence. This social distribution of space is further marked by the fact that addresses had a precisely calibrated economic and therefore social value. By Jane Austen's time, Bath was a resort which combined facilities intended to cure or relieve bodily ill-health and venues in which social and sexual liaisons might be pursued, "a place in which the medicinal and the erotic were intertwined". p. 160. At Bath, "[t]he body is perceived as an object; it's to be prized or appraised, like handsome furniture, as a commodity." p. 161.

• "Like all of Austen's novels, Persuasion is a study in the moral atmosphere of place." 161. The warmth of the Hatvilles at Lyme is contrasted with the cold formality of the Elliots at Bath. The simple polarity between the Elliots and their friends and the Harvilles and their friend Captain Benwick is not the whole story of the novel. The Musgraves are as hospitable as the Harvilles and indeed establish a relationship with the Harvilles as soon as they meet, and Bath is as open to the Crofts and their naval friends as it is to the Elliots. 161-162.

• "Persuasion is a novel of trauma: of broken bones, broken heads and broken hearts." 165. In each of the main settings is someone who is disabled as a result of injury or disease, or there occurs something that reminds the reader of the vulnerability of the human body. Most important is Anne Elliot's continuing sense of loss and deprivation, a result of her earlier break with Wentworth. This reading centers on the notion of injury. The novel is concerned with the ways people adjust to loss, or curtailment of life, and live through, or cope with, its deprivations. 165. "Austen's concern is not so much with with accidents or misfortune as such, as with the positive human responses to suffering. In particular, she depicts (and critically examines) the isolated individual's attempt to gather the emotional resources to cope with constant pain of a psychological nature, and the modes of support and nursing that enable others to endure and overcome their suffering and deprivation." 166.

• There follows an extended discussion of "nursing." 166-174. In the overt figure of Nurse Rooke, nursing is represented as both female and socially marginal.It was the common view of moralists of this period that there was a necessary relationship between femaleness and nursing, as if true womanliness were expressed in devotion to the well-being of others. 166-167. This is a curiously limited femaleness. "A true woman will necessarily be a good nurse, but her womanliness will be one in which her own purposes and sexual desires will be subordinated to, and sublimated in, her ministrations to the child or to the patient." 168. Persuasion puts nursing in a new light by assigning "nursing" functions to the principal male character, Wentworth, who in effect nurses Benwick through the worst of his grief. 170-171.

• Wiltshire discusses the character of Anne Elliot as an exemplar of classical Christian stoicism. 174-180. Anne must find within herself the resources to live through her neglect by and isolation from others: in words Wiltshire quotes from a sermon given by Henry Austen, her character was "deeply to feel, and strictly to command [her] feelings." 175. "[T]he most original feature of the novel's prose, as Litz and others have pointed out, is the freedom with which it imitates the nervous swings of Anne's feelings as she struggles to command them, aroused by the sight of Wentworth again..." 176. We also see Wentworth struggling to control his feelings after Louisa's accident. 178. Wiltshire points to writings by Samuel Johnson (The Rambler, particularly # 32, and Rasselas) as possible sources for Austen's beliefs. 179-180.

• "The Fall" serves a number of purposes. It allows Anne to demonstrate her cool competence in an emergency, something that Wentworth notices as part of his growing attraction to Anne. It provides a life-altering cause for major changes in Louisa's personality. It provides an occasion for Wentworth to shoulder responsibility in front of Anne. It enacts the failure of Louisa and Wentworth to "connect": Louisa invites Wentworth to assume a lover's role ("grasp my hand and save me") and Wentworth fails. 184-190.

• Persuasion (according to Judy Van Sickle Johnson) is the most "physical" of Austen's novels. Austen successfully presents a slowly renewing emotional attachment between Anne and Wentworth through physical signs: glances, conscious gazes, slight bodily contact. 190. In the original version of the ending, theirt reconciliation is achieved almost exclusively through "body language." The rewritten version, however, centers the reconciliation on Anne's eloquent speech to Captain Harville on the subject of constancy. For the first time in the novel, it is Anne who speaks for herself and her feelings and Wentworth who listens. 190-192. Is there a relationship between bodily signs and the spirit? The novel gives a complex answer. The communication through body language has been mentioned. On the other hand, the novel frequently presents a mismatch between inner being and outer appearance. More fundamentally, there is the irony resulting from the presentation of wounded or disabled bodies (Anne, Mrs. Smith) as emblems of healthy living and spiritual resources. 190-196.

Chapter 5: Sanditon—the enjoyments of invalidism

• In Persuasion, Mary Musgrove (Anne Elliot's sister) uses the excuse of illness as a mostly unsuccessful means through which to compel respect and attention from her relations. Austen portrays Mary's hypochondria with a mild contempt. 197-198. Sanditon abounds with hypochondriacs, who are by contrast "presented with amazing inventiveness, brio and zest. There is not just one 'sad invalid' here, but at least three..." — Diana Parker, Susan Parker and Arthur Parker, who are to be laughed at and enjoyed rather than despised. 198-199. The novel fragment which remains is a satire on hypochondria in all of its manifestations (individual, social and commercial). It is remarkable that this manuscript (which clearly shows the physical signs of Austen's last illness in the handwriting), written by someone who is dying and must have suspected it, "is a highly successful and energetic comedy making fun of the so-called sick, in which...the illness symptoms so floridly displayed in the text are attributed roundly to nothing but Vanity." 200. This treatment is parallel to the treatment by Austen of her mother's various illnesses and her own last illness in her surviving letters. "In such remarks, one can usually detect Austen's impulse to assert the supremacy of the will or the moral self over the bodily." 202. Austen's concern in Sanditon with "bodily self-preoccupation" was not visible in her works after "Love and Freindship," which contains similar themes. 203.

• Mr. Parker's "reliance on his 'sensations' as a key to external reality is a sign of the romantic culture that links the various eccentrics in this text." 205. Sir Edward Denham's "literary rhapsodies" are so exaggerated as to verge on burlesque, but his hyperbole provides a strong thematic link to the hypochondria of the Parkers. 212. "The body in Sanditon becomes the site for a particularly sharp confrontation between the ideologies of eighteenth century rationalism and romanticism. The fragment pits a strong absurdity against a strong common-sense." 217.

• While Sanditon is sometimes criticized for the unsubtlety of its writing, which is blamed on the unfinished state of the manuscript, the manuscript evidence suggests something else. Almost all of the changes Austen made as she wrote serve to exaggerate the traits of her characters and broaden the humor. 209-215.

• Sanditon is the logical culmination of Austen's Chawton period novels since it is concerned with ill-health as a social phenomenon.

"Illness was, in the great tradition of comedy, to be made fun of, but was therefore seen, inevitably, in its social relations, as performance. Skepticism about the validity or reality of disease conditions is the only conceivable standpoint for such comedy, but if illness or (what amounted to the same thing) complaints of illness could be seen as modes of social power, or of domestic coercion, then the treatment of illness, whether professional or amateur, whether doctoring or nursing, could also be seen as a part of the politics and economics of the body. In the absence of real power, women find a substitute for it in acts of ostensible medical charity...." 218.

"In Sanditon, eighteenth-century reclusive sensibility has become nineteenth century invalidism: the eighteenth century man or woman of feeling has been transformed into the nneteenth century 'invalide." Invalidism has now become, as it was to be throughout the century, an advertisement for genteel snobbery and middle-class status....What is different is that invalidism is no longer merely a private resort (a protest against the world) but the instigator and pivot of economic activity." 219.

Important concepts

This is a list of concepts that we may want to address in the article:

• Austen's minimalist style
• Austen's irony
• the genre of the novel of manners (including: the small compass of the topics, relation to fairy tales); country-house novel
• importance of reading and re-reading in the novels
• Austen's political leanings; to what extent Austen is a political writer at all
• Austen's feminism - to what extent is she a feminist?
• Austen's view of history
• the theme of the heroine's "imprisonment"
• economics: attention to details of money and its legal entanglements; class differentiation
• what is characteristic of the juvenilia vs. the early novels vs. the late novels
• self vs. society / self in society
• conversations about literature as a means of assessing the morality of characters
• the presence or absence, and role, of an older (usually male) mentor
• the corruption characteristic of town (London, Portsmouth) versus the "health" of life in the country

Quotations

This is a list of famous Austen quotations that we might think about including in our discussion of her works.

The quotable Austen

________

• "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." (first sentence, P&P)

• "Yes, novels;—for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, is she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And 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 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." (This would have to be cut down, obviously.) (end of Chapter 5, Vol. I, NA)

• "I read it [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs—the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books." (NA, Vol I Ch. XIV)

• [Catherine is embarrassed that she knows so little of drawing and art and cannot discuss the subject with Henry Tilney and his sister.] "She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance. A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can....But Catherine did not know her own advantages—did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward." (NA, Vol I, Ch. XIV)

• "Catherine wished to congratulate him [her brother James on his engagement], but knew not what to say, and her eloquence was only in her eyes. From them however the eight parts of speech shone out most expressively, and James could combine them with ease." (Northanger Abbey, Vol I, Ch XV)

• [Henry Tilney, reacting to Catherine's belief that General Tilney murdered his wife] "If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you—Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?" (NA, at the end of Vol. II, Ch IX)

• "...nothing could shortly be clearer, than that it had all been a voluntary, self-created delusion, each trifling circumstance receiving importance from an imagination resolved on alarm, and every thing forced to bend to one purpose by a mind which, before she entered the Abbey, had been craving to be frightened....it seemed as if the whole thing might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged.

"Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the South of France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and in the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist. Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as were not spotless as an angel, might have the dispositions of a fiend. But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad. Upon this conviction, she would not be surprized if even in Henry and Eleanor Tilney, some slight imperfection might hereafter appear..." (NA, Vol II, Ch. X)

• "I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. . . . I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others." (Chapter 23, Persuasion)

• of Edward's proposal: "In what manner he expressed himself, and how he was received, need not be particularly told. This only need be said;—that when they all sat down to table at four o' clock, about three hours after his arrival, he had secured his lady, engaged her mother's consent, and was not only in the rapturous profession of the lover, but in the reality of reason and truth, one of the happiest of men" (Chapter 13, S&S)

• Emma's response to Mr. Knightley's proposal of marriage: "—She spoke then, on being so entreated.―What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.—" (Emma, Chapter 49)

• "The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labor." (Letter to J. E. Austen, December 16, 1816)

• Edmund and Fanny: "'But I do talk to him [her uncle] more than I used. I am sure I do. Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?'

  'I did—and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired further.'

  'And I longed to do it—but there was such a dead silence! And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like—I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.'" (MP, Volume 2, Chapter 3)

• "I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a Clergyman as you gave me the sketch of in your note of Nov: 16. But I assure you I am not. The comic part of the Character I might be equal to, but not the Good, the Enthusiastic, the Literary. Such a Man's Conversation must at times be on subjects of Science & Philosophy of which I know nothing—or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations & allusions which a Woman, who like me, knows only her own Mother-tongue & has read very little in that, would be totally without the power of giving.—A Classical Education, or at any rate, a very extensive acquaintance with English Literature, Ancient & Modern, appears to me quite Indispensible for the person who w^d do any justice to your Clergyman—And I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible Vanity, the most unlearned, & uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress." (Letter to James Stanier Clark, ?21 December 1815, responding to his suggestions that Austen write a novel about a clergyman very much like himself. Rev. Clarke was reluctant to take "no" for an answer.) Le Fay, Jane Austen's Letters, p. 306.

• "She grew absolutely ashamed of herself.―Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.

"How despicably have I acted!" she cried.—"I, who have prided myself on my discernment!―I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.―How humiliating is this discovery!―Yet, how just a humiliation!―Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.―Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself." (P & P, vol. II, chapter 13 (Ch. 36))

• "Thank you for your note. As you had not heard from me at that time it was very good in you to write, but I shall not be so much your debtor soon.—I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London;—on Wednesday I received one copy, sent down by Falknor, with three lines from Henry....Miss Benn dined with us on the very day of the Books coming, & in the even^g we set fairly at it & read half the 1^st vol. to her [without her suspecting the identity of the author]....She was amused, poor soul! that she c^d not help you know, with two such people [Jane Austen and her mother] to lead the way; but she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.—There are a few Typical errors—& a "said he" or a "said she" would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear—but "I do not write for such dull Elves"/"As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves." [Letter to Cassandra Austen, 29 January 1813, reporting the arrival of the printed volumes of Pride and Prejudice]

• "...our 2^d evening's reading to Miss Benn had not pleased me so well, but I beleive [sic] something must be attributed to my Mother's too rapid way of getting on....—Upon the whole however I am quite vain enough & well satisfied enough.—The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling;—it wants shade;—it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter—of sense if it could be had, if not of solemn specious nonsense—about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte—or anything that would form a contrast & bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness & Epigrammatism of the general stile.—I doubt your quite agreeing with me here—I know your starched Notions." Letter to Cassandra Austen, 4 February 1813]

• "You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand & left....You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life;—3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on—and I hope you will write a great deal more, & make full use of them while they are so favorably arranged. You are but now coming to the heart & beauty of your book; till the heroine grows up, the fun must be imperfect—...." [Letter to her niece, Anna Austen, of 9 September 1815 commenting on a draft of Anna's novel]

Reading list

Collaboration on notes

• Galperin, William (2003). The Historical Austen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-812-23687-4.

Awadewit's homework

• Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, eds. Jane Austen in Hollywood

Simmaren's Reading List

Strike-out indicates extent to which work read and notes written

• Alexander, Christine and Juliet McMaster, editors, The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge U. K. 2005 [ISBN 10-0-521-81293-3]
• Butler, Marilyn Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford University Press (Oxford 1975) [ISBN 0-19-812968-8]
• Collins, Irene Jane Austen and the Clergy, The Hambledon Press (London 1994) [ISBN 1-85285-114-7]
• Doody, Margaret Anne "Jane Austen's Reading," The Jane Austen Companion. Macmillan Publishing Company (New York 1986) [ISBN 0-02-545540-0]
• Duckworth, Alistair The Improvement of the Estate, Johns Hopkins University Press(Baltimore 1971) [ISBN 0-8018-1269-0]
• Gay, Penny Jane Austen and the Theatre, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge 2002) [ISBN 0-521-65213-8]
• Grey, J. David (managing editor ) The Jane Austen Companion, Macmillan Publishing Company (New York 1986) [ISBN 0-52-545540-0]
• Harding, D. W., "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen," in Ian Watt, editor, Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc. (Englewood Cliffs 1963) [Library of Congress Catalog No. 63-9516], pp. 166-179
• Jenkyns, Richard A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen, Oxford University Press (Oxford 2004) [ISBN 0-19-927761-7]
• Lascelles, Mary Jane Austen and Her Art, Oxford University Press (Oxford 1966) [reprint]
• Litz, A. Walton Jane Austen: A Study of Her Development, Oxford University Press (New York 1965)
• MacDonagh, Oliver Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds, Yale University Press (New Haven 1991)[ISBN 0-300-05084-4]
• Mudrick, Marvin. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, University of California Press (Berkeley 1952)
• Sutherland, Kathryn Jane Austen's Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood Oxford University Press (Oxford 2005) [ISBN 0-19-925872-4]
• Todd, Janet (editor) Jane Austen In Context, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, U. K. 2005) [ISBN 0-521-82644-6]
• Waldron, Mary Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge U. K., 1999) [ISBN 0-521-00388-1]
• Watt, Ian (editor) Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs 1963) [ISBN 0-130-53769-0]
• Wiltshire, John Recreating Jane Austen, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, U. K. 2001) [ISBN 0-521-00282-6]
• Wiltshire, John Jane Austen and the Body: The Picture of Health, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, U. K. 1992) [ISBN 0-521-41476-8]

Books for later

• Judy Simons, ed. Jane Austen and Cinema
• Judy Simons, "Classics and Trash: Reading Austen in the 1990s" Women's Writing 5 (1998): 27-39