Perhaps people recognised another layer to Carpenter’s enthusiasm for memorialising Austen. Carpenter and his wife had lost their twenty-two-year-old son, Lieutenant John Philip Carpenter of the 1st Battalion East Surrey Regiment, on active service in Italy in 1944 and undertook the purchase and restoration of Chawton Cottage as a memorial to him as well as to its famous former resident. Much of Carpenter’s indefatigable energy on behalf of the museum, and that of his wife – a deeply knowledgable Janeite – was a form of displaced grieving for their own posterity. Austen presented herself quite naturally as a healing agent for these scars of war, and her charming former home, lovingly restored over the years to as close a version as possible of its 1809 self as funds and imagination would allow, was a simple and effective material reminder of all the things that young British soldiers had died for: peace, order, freedom, gentility and beauty.
Dorothy Darnell threw herself into the saving of Chawton Cottage with true zealotry, making extensive enquiries in the village and among the Austen descendants to discover the nature and whereabouts of any Austen memorabilia, furniture, etc. and all available local traditions and gossip about the family and their home. Though it seemed, as Elizabeth Jenkins said later, ‘as if nothing would ever come to light’,41 Darnell’s instinct proved right: a table which had been bought by a neighbour from the sale of Cassandra’s effects in 1845 came back down the road to the cottage, as did the flagstones from the kitchen floor, which had been removed to form a path in the Dower House garden. Once the museum was established, it became the natural focus of interest in Austen and in time would exercise a remarkable pull on the heartstrings and consciences of those people who were in possession of Austen relics.
As those relics lost personal significance in the family, they gained in monetary value in the market. Pierpont Morgan and Charles Hogan had been early beneficiaries, picking up what are now thought of as priceless treasures for perfectly affordable prices. Another avid American collector was Mrs Alberta Hirsheimer Burke, wife of Henry Gershon Burke, a successful lawyer and accountant. Together the couple acquired an unmatched collection of Austen material, including first editions of all the novels, manuscript letters, memorabilia, rare editions (Siegfried Sassoon’s first edition of Emma among them) and over 1,000 books by and about Austen: her eventual bequest of much of this material to the Morgan Library in New York has made that the most valuable Austen archive in the world. In 1948 Mrs Burke bought several items from the Sotheby’s sale of Frederick Lovering’s collection (sold by Charles Austen’s family in the 1920s). They included the letters by Cassandra to Anne Sharp and Fanny Knight describing Jane’s last illness and death, and a lock of Jane’s hair given by Cassandra to Harriet Palmer, Charles Austen’s sister-in-law and later second wife.
Mrs Burke didn’t enjoy her purchase of the lock of hair long, however. She and her husband were among the earliest members of the Jane Austen Society and it was at the 1949 meeting at Chawton that Mrs Burke made a dramatic presentation, apparently acting on the spur of the moment. T. Edward Carpenter, who had also bought items at the Sotheby’s sale but had been outbid for the hair, was making a speech about his disappointment, and lamenting the loss of the relic to foreign shores, when Mrs Burke interrupted him from the audience, announced that she was the purchaser, and that she would present the item to the museum. ‘This dramatic moment will be well remembered by those present,’42 the Society reported, understandably amazed by Mrs Burke’s generosity.
The scene was reprised twenty-six years later, with Charles Beecher Hogan in the role of surprise benefactor. As well as conducting valuable private scholarship on Austen,43 Hogan had pursued a long and successful career as an Austen collector since his early acquisition of Jane and Cassandra’s amber crosses for his heiress bride in 1933. His collection, most of which went to the Beinecke Library at Yale on his death in 1983, included a first edition of Sense and Sensibility and a set of first editions of the novels formerly belonging to Edward Knight (which Hogan bequeathed to the Jane Austen Society). This generous Janeite had said as far back as 1966 that he intended to leave the amber crosses to the Society (albeit they were, strictly speaking, his wife’s to give, not his), but on the occasion of addressing the AGM at Chawton House in 1974, surprised everyone by producing the necklaces and making the gift there and then. The crosses were ‘received with delight and considerable emotion by those present’.44
As with Mrs Burke and the lock of hair, the suddenness of the gift and the theatricality of announcing it at Chawton House in front of the assembled membership of the Jane Austen Society suggests religious parallels: a donor, a relic, a priesthood, a congregation, a sacred place. The answer to prayer. On both occasions, members wept for joy at the return of the hallowed objects to their rightful place.
Despite these generous gifts, there was a sense of slight desperation at the relative ease with which Americans, with their money and hunger for cultural emblems, could acquire Austen memorabilia and remove them from the country. It was a common complaint of the time that, through sheer dollar-power and craving, so many gems of British heritage were ending up in the States. In the early 1970s, popular opinion was freshly offended by the sale of London Bridge and its removal to what was seen by many as an incongruous new home in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. Never mind that the 1825 structure was only the latest of many former bridges on that Thames site; its loss was treated like the loss of all of them. The country wasn’t used to feeling the sharp end of cultural colonisation, being the looted rather than the lootee. Ten years after the Hogan gift, T. E. Carpenter’s anxieties were still not wholly quieted, and he summed up the feelings of the Jane Austen Society and the country when he said of the large number of Austen letters that had ended up in North America, ‘They ought to be with us.’45
* * *
A properly researched biography of Austen, by the novelist and former Clarendon Press employee Elizabeth Jenkins, did not appear until 1938. That book, and Mary Lascelles’s classic study, Jane Austen and her Art (1939), were part of a new Austen industry arising from Chapman’s editorial work. Lascelles’s intelligent speculation about Austen’s conduct of her career and her analysis of Austen’s style broke new ground critically and biographically. Far from believing that ‘everything worth saying on [the] subject had been said already’, Lascelles positioned herself ‘at the beginning of the exciting “how?” and “why?” of analysis’.46 After Lascelles, no one questioned that Austen could bear comparison with the great novelists of the later nineteenth century – with Dickens, Dostoevsky, James – and there was widespread recognition of her role in modernising the novel. Her credentials as a classic author and cornerstone of the canon were confirmed; even ‘maverick’ critics such as F. R. Leavis awarded Austen a pivotal position. ‘Jane Austen is the inaugurator of the great tradition of the English novel,’ Leavis declared in the opening chapter of his most famous book, ‘and by “great tradition” I mean the tradition to which what is great in English fiction belongs.’47
The new accent was on revisionism, the more surprising the better. The Communist poet and essayist Edgell Rickword placed Austen in his own ‘great tradition’ of English writers alert to social change, which included Charlotte Brontë, Matthew Arnold, Trollope, Gissing and Richard Jefferies. Rickword took the rarity of Austen’s ‘outbursts’ in the novels as evidence of their significance, seeing them not as slips but the tip of a very large iceberg. The scene in Emma, for instance, when Jane Fairfax exclaims against the governess trade, he felt reversed the usual view of the author’s intentions: ‘It is very unusual for Jane Austen to refer to flesh. She must have intended to bring the protest home to the most obtuse.’48 David Daiches went further than this, describing Austen’s work as ‘Marxist before Marx’, a conclusion W. H. Auden had, in his own way, reached in the 1930s in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, with this characterisation of the novelist as a beady-eyed monitor of the bottom line:
She was not an unshockable blue-stocking;
If shades remain the characters they were,
No doubt she still considers you as shocking.
But tell Jane Austen, that is, if you dare,
How much her novels are beloved down here.
She wrote them for posterity, she said;
’Twas rash, but by posterity she’s read.
You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me feel uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle-class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.49
Austen was beginning to be seen through the lens of alternative ideologies and different disciplines; Geoffrey Gorer, an anthropologist, was one of the first critics to apply Freudian analysis to Austen’s novels, identifying a recurrent reversed Oedipal pattern in Austen’s novels, of heroines who actively dislike their mothers and marry men who stand in a paternal relationship to them. The sudden abandonment of ‘her own myth’, as he calls it, in Persuasion, with the mother-figure Lady Russell not entirely blamed and a merciless portrait of Anne’s father, indicated a hidden but significant personal change: ‘she had learned that, like all myths, it was eventually an enemy of life’.50
The most dramatically revisionist view of Austen was put forward by the psychologist D. W. Harding in 1940 in his essay ‘Regulated Hatred’, a piece of social as much as literary criticism, the very title of which was calculated to ‘wake the Jane Austenite up’. Harding argued that Austen couldn’t rightly be described as a satirist at all, as her objects were more personal and ‘more desperate’ to find a way of living with her own critical attitudes. She was not seeking to entertain ‘a posterity of urbane gentlemen’ with her writing, but looking for ‘unobtrusive spiritual survival, without open conflict with the friendly people around her’.51
Harding’s subject was as much ‘the atmosphere surrounding her work’ as the work itself, and he characterised it as ‘seriously misleading’. Far from providing urbanity, calm and genteel sensitivity, Harding found the novels and letters full of disturbing astringency that could only be enjoyed if deliberately misread. The popular impression of the author was therefore, in his opinion, utterly false, and its wide currency ‘an indication of Jane Austen’s success in an essential part of her complex intention as a writer’. ‘Her books’, he wrote, ‘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.’52
Harding was not saying anything absolutely new – Mrs Oliphant had remarked on Austen’s cynicism seventy years earlier, and Reginald Farrer, in 1917, had remarked that ‘her present “fans” do not know her place, and their antics would without doubt have excited Jane’s lethal irony’.53 But Harding was saying it at greater length, and people were at last ready to hear it.
In the years after the war, Austen became subject-of-choice for all the most ambitious literary critics, the Everest glistening majestically in the distance, demanding to be attempted. Marvin Mudrick, Lionel Trilling, Ian Watt, Tony Tanner, A. Walton Litz and Raymond Williams all wrote trenchantly about Austen; even Edmund Wilson, who seemed unsure of his admiration, indulged ‘A Long Talk’ about her. On the question of ‘smallness’, Edmund Wilson chose to turn the telescope round the other way, and wonder that the ‘spirit of classical comedy … should have embodied itself in England in the mind of a well-bred spinster, the daughter of a country clergyman, who never saw any more of the world than was made possible by short visits to London and a residence of a few years in Bath and who found her subjects mainly in the problems of young provincial girls looking for husbands’. This was a point made differently by Q. D. Leavis in one of her remarkable essays on Austen for Scrutiny in the 1940s. Listing many extraordinary experiences of which Jane Austen had first-hand or close knowledge – fatal accidents, violent deaths, financial straits, prosecution by the law, public disgrace, sexual misconduct, war, revolution, bankruptcy, elopement, travel – Leavis remarked that ‘to ascribe the lack of dramatic incident in the novels to the author’s humdrum experience and confined outlook is clearly wrong; the novels are limited in scope and subject by deliberate intention’.54
Q. D. Leavis’s ‘Critical Theory of Jane Austen’s Writings’ established a chronology that rejected the ‘two phases’ theory, so beloved of sentimentalists. ‘The business of literary criticism is surely not to say “Inspiration” and fall down and worship,’ she asserted tartly, ‘and in the case of Jane Austen it is certainly not entitled to take up such an unprofitable attitude.’55 It was no longer thought appropriate to flatter or patronise Austen. When Arnold Kettle returned to the issue of Austen’s limitations in 1951, he accepted that ‘the silliest of all criticisms of Jane Austen is the one which blames her for not writing about the battle of Waterloo and the French Revolution. She wrote about what she understood and no artist can do more.’56 ‘But did she understand enough?’ he went on to ask. Perhaps there was, after all, something to ‘blame’ Austen for – her unquestioning acceptance of the class society in which she grew up. The ‘sensitive values’ recommended in Emma, Kettle contended, are applicable only to a minority, whose moral and social refinement is maintained entirely at the expense of other people. Is there not, he wondered, in the status quo underlying Emma, a complacency which renders ‘the hundred little incomplacencies’ which the book promotes almost irrelevant?57
The Janeite torch was carried through this dark wood of New Criticism by Lord David Cecil, the elegant old Etonian who had written in comfortably hyperbolic tone in 1931 that:
There are those who do not like her; as there are those who do not like sunshine or unselfishness. But the very nervous defiance with which they shout their dissatisfaction shows that they know they are a despised minority. All discriminating critics admire her books, most educated readers enjoy them; her fame, of all English novelists, is the most secure.58
Cecil was a committed Janeite, President of the Jane Austen Society and public commentator on the author for more than forty years. His short biography, A Portrait of Jane Austen, published in 1978, was immediately popular and has never been out of print. Full of inaccuracies as it is, Cecil’s beautiful prose, discriminating sensibility and aristocratic charm (as well as the lavish production of the book, which had dozens of illustrations, many in colour) made this the biography of choice for the general consumer of ‘all things Austen’. Cecil’s view of the world that Austen inhabited was wildly sentimental, but beguiling. Take his description of ‘the green smiling landscape of field and woodland and leafy hedgerows’ in which Austen grew up, a style to rival Thomas Gray:
with something at once homely and immemorial in the atmosphere emanating from its thatched villages, each centring around a grey old church, its interior enriched with sculptured monuments of successive generations of local landowners and set in a grassy churchyard populated by gravestones inscribed with the names of successive generations of their tenants.59
Cecil’s biography linked Austen firmly with genteel, ‘smiling’ southern landscapes like these, old parish churches, comfortable country houses and the most attractive aspects of Regency decor and architecture, praising Chippendale and Sheraton chairs, Wedgwood and Worcester cups, not because there is any evidence that Jane Austen ever sat on the one or raised the other to her lips but as examples of the ‘peculiar amenity’ of life at the time, ‘provided one was born English and in sufficiently easy circumstances’.60 Quite a proviso. Anything excellent or pleasant of the period could be co-opted in this way to associate with the subject; Austen’s novels, for example, are ‘artistic achievements of a Mozartian perfection’.61
Cecil’s heritage-heavy approach spoke powerfully to the masses of people beginning to take a somewhat proprietary interest in the huge range
of stately homes and estates that opened to the public as tourist sights in the 1970s and 80s. The cash-strapped, denatured gentry of the post-war world, forced by a succession of popular governments’ taxation strategies to open the doors of their ancestral homes to ‘the people’, were regularly to be seen selling tickets of admission to their own drawing-rooms on a Sunday afternoon, far more vivid examples of ‘living history’ than the costumed actors whom one encounters at most heritage sites today.
David Cecil’s book begins with a visit to such a property, and for a moment the reader might believe that he, like the rest of us, had been contemplating ‘the portraits of powdered and beruffled ladies and gentlemen staring down’ from the ticket-holding side of a scalloped rope, but no: there ‘with … the tall windows open onto stretches of parkland hazy in the light of a fine September evening, my mother opened Pride and Prejudice and began to read it aloud to me’. Son of the Marquess of Salisbury, grandson of the former prime minister and with impeccable aristocratic pedigrees on both sides of his family, Lord David was, of course, part of that gorgeous landscape of privilege himself.
Fanny, Lady Knatchbull, would have been amazed to see how, more than a century after her death, Aunt Jane could be so strongly associated with refinement and class, and how many aristocratic and establishment figures considered her their favourite writer. There was an unusually high proportion of upper-class people on the committee of the Jane Austen Society from its very beginnings, when R. W. Chapman persuaded the 7th Duke of Wellington to be the first President, ‘the advantage of which, both socially and in the literary sphere, was very great’, as Elizabeth Jenkins wrote later.62 In the 1980s, Margaret Lane, Countess of Huntingdon, was thought ‘lovely to look at, and lovely to listen to’ as President, and when an Austen aficionado was required for a TV quiz in 1957, Lady Cynthia Asquith was the one chosen.
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