Twain didn’t encounter Austen’s novels under very auspicious circumstances. During his gruelling world lecture tour of 1895–6, conducted to raise some quick cash after the bankruptcy in 1894 of his publishing firm, Webster & Co., Twain read The Vicar of Wakefield and ‘some of Jane Austen’ on the boat between Wellington and Sydney, and thought them both ‘thoroughly artificial’.24 A few weeks later, on the long haul from Sydney to Ceylon, he found ‘the best library I have seen in a ship yet’, though that wasn’t saying much, as the usual suspects were staring out at him: ‘I must read that devilish Vicar of Wakefield again. Also Jane Austen.’25 The experience proved decisive, for on the next ship, from Madras to Mauritius, he was relieved to find there was no Austen on board: ‘Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.’26
Twain never tired of railing against Austen or (apparently) returning, aghast, to her novels. ‘Whenever I take up Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, I feel like a barkeeper entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensations would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.’ This characteristically epigrammatic opener is from an essay on Jane Austen which Twain never published in his lifetime. But Twain took his antipathy to Austen so seriously one can’t help seeing it as an inflated response to the ‘Presbyterianism’ he saw in her, and his settled dislike of the English. Passing through India on his 1896 tour, between one Austen novel and another, Twain had been disgusted by the British Army’s refusal to acknowledge the danger to troops of contracting syphilis, of which he witnessed many bad cases. ‘Then those 70,000 young men go home and marry fresh young English girls and transmit a heritage of disease to their children and grandchildren,’ Twain wrote in his diary. ‘England is the home of pious cant.’27
The strength of Twain’s feelings against Austen was also partly in reaction to those of his friend W. D. Howells, who had become something of a one-man Austenolatry machine. As editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Monthly in the 1870s and editorial writer for Harper’s Monthly in the following years, Howells kept his fulsome praise of Austen ever before the public. Twain goaded him with letters claiming that he could just about read Poe’s prose if he was paid to, but not Jane Austin’s [sic]: ‘Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity to me that they allowed her to die a natural death!’28 Howells said later that Austen was Twain’s ‘prime abhorrence’, but that ‘he forbore withering me with his scorn, apparently because we had been friends so long, and he more pitied than hated me for my bad taste’.29 Perhaps, like the argument between G. H. Lewes and Charlotte Brontë in the 1840s, and like the antipathy that F. R. Leavis felt towards Lord David Cecil a century later, the difference between Twain and Howells was another example of what Ian Watt has called ‘the total impasse between different personalities which the subject of Jane Austen so perennially provokes’.30
* * *
Austen’s most ardent fans and most dispassionate critics in the late nineteenth century were American, including the writer who was later called Austen’s literary ‘son’ and heir, Henry James. James knew George Pellew, the young Harvard man who had written the first thesis on Austen, and in a letter to him, with characteristically deferential politeness, referred to the author as ‘the delightful Jane’.31 His public articulations about Austen aired a much more subtle and discriminating view. In his essay ‘The Lesson of Balzac’, first published in 1905, James conceded that Austen was ‘one of those of the shelved and safe, for all time’, but, like the Brontës (the industry around whom appalled him), she had entered a zone of unreal and disproportionate attention:
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.32
James’s convoluted expression here, and insistence on there being a degree of Austen appreciation which is ‘merely logical’ and others that rise above the author’s ‘intrinsic merit and interest’ seems sniffy and ungenerous, but his underlying point was in defence of this – and any – author against forces which prevent him or her from being read in ways that are untrammelled by commerce and celebrity. Overvaluation, he believed, does no one any good, and his chilliest remarks are reserved for that distorting agent, ‘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 distinctly 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.33
James was writing before the dawn of the Jane Austen tote bag and T-shirt, of course, and the ‘saleability’ he refers to was limited to print versions of Austen’s novels, magazine-fillers and a very few stage productions. Nevertheless, ‘pleasant twaddle’ about Austen was becoming unavoidable; as Sarah Malden had remarked in 1889, ‘those who do appreciate her novels will think no praise too high for them, while those who do not, will marvel at the infatuation of her admirers; for no one ever cares moderately for Jane Austen’s works’.34
The idea that Austen had divided the reading nation was echoed by R. H. Hutton the following year: ‘it cannot be denied that for a very considerable number of remarkably able men, Miss Austen wields no spell at all, though for those over whom she does wield a spell, she wields a spell of quite curious force.’ His analysis of Austen’s charm addressed the issue of ‘smallness’ as a deliberate choice on the part of the author, which chimes, or fails to, with her readers’ temperaments. Austen’s artistry, Hutton claimed,
is a selection of all that is most superficially interesting in human life, of all that is most easily appreciated without going very deep, and an exclusion of all that it takes real wear and tear of spirit to enter thoroughly into … It was hardly possible to find a finer sieve, a more effective strainer for artistic material than such a mind as this, and the result was something exquisitely interesting and attractive to those who liked the fastidious selection of social elements which such a mind instinctively made for itself, and intolerably uninteresting and unattractive to those who loved to brood over the larger enterprises, the deeper passions, the weightier responsibilities, the more massive interests at which Miss Austen hardly glanced except to convince herself that she must leave them to the care of others.35
It is Austen’s ability to intrigue ‘remarkably able men’, even ‘statesmen and thinkers’, that encouraged Hutton to conclude that what was coming through Austen’s ‘fine feminine sieve’ was not simply pap. He pictures those able men turning gratefully from the cares of the real world to Austen’s parallel universe, where she had created for the reader ‘a social world … relieved of the bitterest elements and infinitely more entertaining, … which rivets the attention without wearying it, and makes life appear far less dreary and burdensome, though also far less laborious, eager, and anxious than it really is’. In this delicately altered reality, one could find the most extravagant form of escape.
Had any female writer ever had quite this effect before? ‘The power of attracting powerful minds’ was what James Edward Austen-Leigh had also marvelled at, and his friend Cheney (of ‘the test’) had been ‘one of the ablest men’. None of the factors usually despised in women’s literature, the absence of big themes, the love stories, the thoroughly domestic focus, seems to have stood in the way of their appreciation, for they took c
omfort in perceiving a controlling intelligence behind it: discriminating, generous, critical and humorous – a ‘powerful mind’ itself. Cultural conservatives took this as evidence, not that women might have greater potential than was usually assumed, but that Austen was some sort of exception, almost an honorary man.
It was no accident that Austen’s appeal was recognised by this group during a period of rising feminism and that her verbal restraint and quiet life began to be held up as examples of what the spectre of the 1890s ‘New Woman’ was threatening to overthrow. The growing number of educated, independent (but poor) unmarried women in society was a new and worrying phenomenon, a challenge to male dominance of the professions, a threat to sound government if they succeeded in getting the vote, an affront to every traditional value. The birth rate was falling, home life was suffering and the world was beginning to turn upside down. Jane Austen came in very handily here as a model of a high-achieving woman in an unreformed society who seemed to have been perfectly happy with her lot, who, far from complaining about the conditions of her own existence, or the rights of women generally, beamed her cheerful, contented disposition on all and sundry and quietly got on with writing her charming books. If a great writer could cause so little disturbance and make so few demands domestically and professionally, what need ordinary women of any special treatment?
George Saintsbury made the comparison explicit in his preface to Pride and Prejudice, where he praised Elizabeth Bennet as having ‘nothing offensive, nothing viraginous, nothing for the “New Woman” about her, [who] has by nature what the best modern (not ‘new’) women have by education and experience, a perfect freedom from the idea that all men may bully her if they choose, and that most will run away with her if they can’.36 Elizabeth is a model for all times, not just her own, ‘not in the least “impudent and mannish grown”’. ‘Mannish’, a favourite term of abuse towards late nineteenth-century feminists, is a word Saintsbury used earlier in his essay to distinguish Austen’s genius, in which he felt there was ‘though nothing mannish, much that was masculine’. It was an interesting distinction: ‘mannish’ viragos on one side, and ‘masculine’ Austen (‘somewhat like a man of the world’ as the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine had suggested back in 1866) on the other.
But Austen could also be held up as an example by the opposite camp. In her essays and feminist journalism, Millicent Fawcett promoted Austen to independent young women of the working and lower middle class as ‘an encouragement to them to be reminded how much good work had been done in various ways by women’.37 For once, ‘work’ didn’t mean the sewing that had featured so prominently in Leslie Stephen’s DNB article, and that was feebly echoed by E. V. Lucas in his entry on Austen for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica: ‘During her placid life Miss Austen never allowed her literary work to interfere with her domestic duties: sewing much and admirably, keeping house, writing many letters and reading aloud.’38 Fawcett was the first person to treat Austen as a producer of ‘good work’, a devoted sister and a ‘thoroughly womanly’ woman,39 and addressed her remarks to those very ‘bachelor girls’ who were regularly vilified in the press as unnatural and oddish. Descriptions of this demographic turn up time and again phrases that could easily apply to Jane Austen herself, from her ‘oddish’ ‘bachelor’ status and independent earning capacity to the ‘sharp and critical common sense’ that Freud found characteristic of his earliest hysteria patients (see his description of ‘Anna O’ and her ‘powerful intellect’ in Studies on Hysteria). And not just the author, but her creations: the Yellow Book’s condemnatory image of women who ‘attempt to take the initiative, particularly in marriage, or attempt to assert themselves emotionally’40 could be aimed exactly at Emma Woodhouse, or George Saintsbury’s intended, Lizzie Bennet.
George Gissing, the author of the 1890s anti-feminist bestseller The Odd Women, thought Austen’s novels ‘very healthy’ and recommended them earnestly to his sister as part of a course of self-improvement.41 Both Austen-Leigh’s Memoir and Jane Austen’s novels were favourites for family reading circles, and were considered eminently ‘safe’ for girls. Actual girls showed a degree of scepticism about the relevance of Austen to their lives at the turn of the new century. In an article for Temple Bar in 1892 called ‘A girl’s opinion on Jane Austen’ (presumably solicited from the young author to test the Zeitgeist), Edith Edlmann protested that Austen’s warmest admirers were found ‘not so much among other young people, as among savants and men of letters’. It was this ‘constant affection of the few and cultured still keeps her in the niche of the temple of fame’. Emma Woodhouse only becomes bearable, Edlmann believed, ‘somewhere about chapter fifty, but we think, on the whole, that it was a pity Knightley didn’t marry Miss Bates’:
We may congratulate ourselves that we live in the days when High Schools, Extension Lectures, Magazine Clubs and lawn-tennis have superseded sentiment, sensibility, hysterics and mutual confidences. Such Schwärmerei we now leave to our German sisters. We also hope that the young lady who could describe herself as ‘doatingly fond of music, and my friends say I am not devoid of taste’ is as obsolete as the atrocities she committed in watercolours, and the fringe and sofa cushions she worked in worsted and beads.’42
The savants and club-men, and the ladies who sewed, were all welcome to her.
* * *
In the last years of the century, two ‘Odd’ but not entirely ‘New’ women, the sisters Constance and Ellen Hill, packed their notebooks and pencils and hired an old-fashioned chaise (of the kind they believed the author might have ridden in) in order to go in search of ‘Austen-land’, as they whimsically called it. They were collecting material for a new kind of book on Jane Austen, one that involved prolonged personal involvement, close research and imaginative engagement. Constance wrote the text, and Ellen drew the pictures, a formula they later employed in similar books on Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth.
Starting at Steventon, the sisters travelled to Reading, Bath, Lyme, Southampton, Stoneleigh Abbey, Chawton, Godmersham and Winchester, poking into any building that had a connection with the author and pursuing any descendants of the family willing to speak to them or show them documents and relics. Constance Hill was much more dogged in her researches than anyone had been before and although her book is horribly gushing and emotional, she captured some interesting information from sources that were just on the brink of disappearing. In Steventon, they happened upon a Wordsworthian ‘old man leaning on a garden gate’ who turned out to be a member of the Littleworth family, son of one of Jane Austen’s god-daughters and also related to the Austen ladies’ manservant William (he who had accompanied the dog, Link, to and from the dairy at Chawton House). He told them that the pump from the former wash-house was the only remnant of the Austens’ home, but that when he was a boy, bricks and rubble from the demolition still littered the field. In Basingstoke, they located the former County Ballroom in a building adjacent to the Angel Inn, degraded in function to a hay loft, but still just recognisable as ‘a reception room of importance; … when we push aside the litter beneath our feet, the fine even planking of a dancing-floor appears’.43 Constance Hill was keen to emphasise the magical aspects of these discoveries, with sudden revelations, miraculous beams of light and inexplicable coincidence all playing their part.
Ellen Hill’s contribution to the book was significant, as the many line drawings she made had an essentially documentary purpose, for all their incipient tweeness. Ellen Hill drew as many objects and buildings as she could from life, and reconstructed other images from prints, or (as in the case of the hay loft/ballroom) from an imaginative projection of her own. The vignettes at the ends of chapters were architectural details of stair-rails or fireplaces or doorways in buildings that Austen would have known, some of which no longer exist. As a result, although it looks and reads a bit like a children’s book, Jane Austen, Her Homes and Her Friends contains valuable extra atoms of Austen information, and marked the
first ‘heritage’ approach to Austen biography.
Part of the appeal of Janeism was its ingrained Englishness, which for cultural and linguistic reasons slowed the dissemination of her works in the non-anglophone world. The few translations that had appeared in the early years, into French, German, Spanish and Swedish, came and went, and there was a lone Danish translation of Sense and Sensibility in mid-century by the Catholic propagandist Carl Karup. Bentley co-published his ‘Standard Novels’ versions with the Parisian firm Galignani in the 1830s, and the German publisher Tauchnitz included Austen in their ‘British Authors’ in the 1860s and 70s, but her presence abroad wasn’t backed up by any critical recognition. Politically and ideologically, Austen was unattractive to the anglophobic Danes and the eastern European nations, and the French were inclined to think of her as a ‘puritan’.44 Walter Scott and his big bow-wow strain was more the thing, and Scott’s popularity abroad left little room for other British authors, and continued long after his star began to wane at home.
Xenophobic Janeites could take comfort in the thought that Austen’s humour was so delicate and gossamer and all that, so finely ironised, that no translation could reproduce it; even the best translation ensured that the essential ‘Jane’ remained where she had always remained in life, in England. They would not have been pleased to discover one of the oddest corners into which Austen penetrated in the last decade of the century, the anarchist cells of Paris. Cells in two senses: Félix Fénéon, poet, essayist and bomber, was both a member of a tight-knit group of political extremists and an inmate for four months of the Mazas prison. It was there that he came upon Jane Austen.
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