Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  The 150th anniversary commemoration of Austen’s death, which took place in Chawton in 1967, was led by a group of impeccably traditional, conservative figures. The Duke of Wellington laid a wreath, the Tory leader, Edward Heath (‘an attentive reader’ of the novels), made a short speech, Isobel Baillie sang and the commentary on a film about the village was spoken by beloved wartime broadcaster Alvar Liddell. The committee that set up the festivities comprised two majors, one brigadier and a Conservative MP.63

  Austen’s attraction for the Tory establishment was much more to do with gentility, decorum and maintaining the status quo than with literature. Sir Hugh Smiley was a well-loved member of the Jane Austen Society committee for thirty years and conducted its affairs ‘with military precision and a Guardsman’s courteous efficiency’;64 his wife was also a long-serving committee member. The Smileys were represented, in an obituary of Sir Hugh, as offering direct links with Jane Austen’s world: ‘their house, with its lovely Regency furniture and its close connections with contemporary thought, is a reminder of how much of modern life can be lived among the beauty of Jane Austen’s era’.65 But while Lady Smiley knew the novels of Jane Austen ‘almost by heart’, the obituary had to admit that Sir Hugh ‘was renowned for claiming that he had not read Jane Austen’s novels and didn’t intend to’.66

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  When David Cecil announced Austen’s fame to be the ‘most secure … of all English novelists’, he did so in the spirit of silencing any further debate with the remaining ‘despised minority’ who disagreed with his conclusion. But the point at which Austen’s status became unassailable in the second half of the last century was also the point at which Austen studies really began to take off. Critical activity, much of it originating across the Atlantic, focused increasingly on political, sociological and historical elements in Austen’s work. Not that any of these had been entirely absent before, but now they were systematised, with whole books emerging on single aspects of the ever-fertile subject.

  D. W. Harding (and Marvin Mudrick in Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, 1952) sparked the reinvention of Austen as an ironist of unplumbable depths open to multiple new interpretations and re-readings. She became a rich subject for feminist, post-feminist and postmodernist commentators in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and the opening up of the female literary culture of the late eighteenth century as an area of research brought every aspect of Austen’s work and life (especially its ‘uneventfulness’) under scrutiny. References in the novels and letters to slavery, civil unrest and war all began to be noticed, and the pragmatism that had shaped Austen’s life, rather than being seen as a symptom of conservatism or complacency, began to look like a deliberate strategy that she had exploited to achieve a degree of autonomy and intellectual freedom.

  One of the most influential Austen books of the 1970s, Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, placed the novelist more thoroughly than ever before in her historical context – not that of Regency decor or Lord David’s teacups, but of revolution and reform. Butler was partly following Alistair Duckworth (in The Improvement of the Estate, 1972) and Raymond Williams (in The Country and the City, 1973), whose discussions of Austen aligned her with forces of change and mobility during the Industrial Revolution. Butler demonstrated that rather than describing ‘an unfocused, idyllic, pre-industrialised village world’ Austen’s fiction was part of a conservative reaction to both the Jacobin novel and Jacobin politics. The book marked Austen’s passage into the Romantic movement, which had seemed to be going on independent of her, albeit she appeared there as a programmatic conservative. Terry Eagleton satirised the effect this had on the critical establishment: ‘The scandal of Butler’s book was that it sheared coolly through decades of Trillingesque talk about Austen’s “tensions” and finely-tuned ambivalences and actually said that, well, when you get down to it, she’s just a straight Tory. Nothing could be at once more obvious and impermissible.’67

  Austen’s primness was also stripped away, as critics began to recognise the worldliness of her ‘marriage plots’ and her interest in sexual politics. Lionel Trilling, in one of several influential essays on Austen, credited her with provoking ‘male panic at a fictional world in which the masculine principle, although represented as admirable and necessary, is prescribed and controlled by a female mind’, representing Austen as perhaps the world’s most influential and sexually manipulative virgin. Austen was a gift to feminist theorists, and provoked intense debate among them as to the nature and degree of her own feminism. In their landmark study, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar claimed that male readers were flattered by Austen’s stories because they describe the submission of not just any women, but women of quality, spirit and intelligence. They saw collusion on the author’s part: ‘No less than the blotter held over the manuscript on her writing desk, Austen’s cover story of the necessity for silence and submission reinforces women’s subordinate position in patriarchal culture.’68 A decade later, the desire to affix blame somewhere in the formula had passed. In her earliest book on Austen, Claudia Johnson allowed for accident and artfulness, with Austen alert to the likely demands of posterity; ‘the precondition of Austen’s posthumous admittance into the canon was the apparent contentment to work artfully within carefully constricted boundaries which have been termed “feminine”’.69

  The Marxist-feminist critic Mary Poovey based her argument about Austen on ideologies of gender that persuade women to accept and validate ideas which perpetuate their own repression. ‘Romance’ plots very obviously do this, with their idealisation of courtship: ‘By focusing on courtship, the myth of romantic love tends to freeze the relationship between a man and a woman at its moment of greatest intensity … when women seem to exercise their greatest power.’70 The promises of Romance are obviously delusional, Poovey pointed out, and the plot has to end well before they are tested; the woman will never be so powerful, or so autonomous, or so desirable, again. But the immediate gratification of this supreme moment is enough, in a romance plot, to blot out the nagging thought of ‘And what happens next?’ The story ends with the triumphant feeling suspended, like a diapason held down firmly at the end of the Wedding March.

  All through the 70s and 80s, individual Austen novels went in and out of favour as the text of the moment in the academy. Oddly enough, it was never Pride and Prejudice, the perennial ‘People’s Choice’; Emma was a favourite in the years when psychoanalytic criticism predominated, Northanger Abbey played right into the hands of the emerging discipline of History of the Book and Mansfield Park surged forward with the rise of postcolonial studies, sparked by the high-profile discussion of the book in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993). Elements in the novel which hardly seemed to be noticed before by critics – the overt acknowledgment of where Sir Thomas Bertram has derived his wealth (slave labour on his plantations in Antigua), the heroine Fanny Price’s outburst about the treatment of slaves, and the ‘dead silence’ her question is met with – have subsequently become, as Rajeswari Sunder Rajan has pointed out, the ‘locus of the novel’s meanings’.71 The fact that this locus has shifted within recent memory from the aborted production of ‘Lovers’ Vows’, or the trip to Sotherton (with all its transgressing of boundaries and metaphors of Improvement), shows how flexible Austen can be in the hands of her interpreters. The character of Sir Thomas Bertram, for instance, has been represented in recent film dramatisations as at best a wholly compromised or complacent figure, at worst (as played by Harold Pinter in Patricia Rozema’s 1996 film) a sadistic and ruthless colonial exploiter. But only forty years ago, even Trilling and Mudrick, who had generally revisionist views of so much else in the novels, saw Sir Thomas in an unequivocally generous light. Trilling thought him the personification of solidity, wholeness and immutability, opposed to the ‘diversification of the self’ threatened by the theatricals: ‘It is he … who makes of Mansfiel
d Park the citadel that it is.’72

  Exponents of ‘heteronormativity’ in Austen’s work now vie with those who note its ‘queerness’. Eve Sedgwick’s provocatively titled essay ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ caused debate and a certain amount of controversy when it appeared in an academic journal in 1993, but didn’t reach the popular press, unlike a less sensational article by Terry Castle two years later in the London Review of Books. Castle was reviewing Deirdre le Faye’s new edition of Austen’s Letters and used the occasion to investigate the passionate nature of the Jane–Cassandra relation. Noting the ‘whimsical yet fierce attachment’ in Jane’s earliest letters to Cassandra, the ‘intense psychic mirroring’ of the older sister by the younger, and ‘a kind of homophilic fascination’ in Austen’s description of women generally, Castle concluded that both sisters ‘found greater comfort and pleasure – more of that “heartfelt felicity” that Emma Woodhouse finds with Mr Knightley, or Elizabeth Bennet with the handsome Darcy – in remaining with one another’.73

  When the editors of the magazine chose to headline the piece ‘Was Jane Austen Gay?’, Castle’s argument became fair game for the press, some members of which chose to interpret the headline (if not the article, which was not read with as much care) as suggesting that the Austen sisters indulged in incestuous lesbian sex. There was outrage from the broadsheets to the tabloids, so affronting was the idea that Austen may have had sexual feelings of any sort, never mind such unconventional ones. As David Nokes observed in the Times Literary Supplement soon after, ‘chief among Austen’s traditionally English virtues is an instinctive reticence about sex … cherished notions of the integrity of Austen’s art are intimately associated with a symbolic fetishization of the physical intactness of her body’.

  The outrage did not die down very quickly, as it was tempered with profound satisfaction at the spectacle of ‘Mr’ Castle, American, academic, and obviously crazed, getting England’s Jane so wrong. Castle’s employers, Stanford University, issued a news release on 16 August 1995 in an attempt to calm the situation. Castle suggested politely that the depth of the reaction in Britain was in proportion to Austen’s iconic status in her homeland:

  I think there is a kind of fetishizing of Austen, not only among British academics, but among a lot of people who join Jane Austen societies, of which there are still a number in England. And [the press coverage] triggered off a very primitive reaction in people who use her to project their own fantasies about the past, and the purity of the past.

  Because Austen also has become ‘an icon of the early 19th-century spinster,’ Castle said, ‘people tend to view her as asexual, as not having had any sort of sensual life at all. But her novels, it seems to me, are about desire and eros and emotion. If they weren’t, why would we care about them?’

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  Alongside all the minutely interpretative work done on Austen in the past three decades sit the achievements of three separate scholars working mostly outside the academy: David Gilson, Brian Southam and Deirdre le Faye. Gilson’s bibliography of Austen, first published in 1983 and subsequently revised, reflects decades of research into the original editions, translations, continuations, later editions and thousands of critical essays and books; its very size and thoroughness make a powerful statement about Austen’s achievement. Brian Southam’s research on Austen’s literary manuscripts in the 1960s opened up the study of the juvenilia and unfinished works, previously treated as ephemera, and his two Critical Heritage volumes – anthologies of criticism with detailed editorial commentary – spearheaded Austen reception studies, a new growth area. Deirdre le Faye, like Gilson a professional librarian, has become a legendary figure in Austen scholarship, having written biographies of both Jane Austen and her cousin Eliza de Feuillide and the popular Jane Austen: The World of her Novels among other books, edited Austen’s Letters (published in 1995), compiled a massive Chronology of Jane Austen and published innumerable articles in The Book Collector, Review of English Studies, Notes & Queries and the Jane Austen Society Collected Reports. Le Faye’s indefatigable hunting down of information about Austen and her circle, the work of a lifetime, has provided an unrivalled factual base for Austen studies and she is the acknowledged super-authority on her subject. But insofar as she prides herself on offering definitive information, ‘hard facts’ and little or (preferably) no interpretation, Le Faye’s work stands in direct and somewhat combative opposition to almost all recent academic writing on Austen, where the very idea of a ‘definitive factual biography’ would be dismissed by any postmodern or new-historicist critic as impossible, and by many others as undesirable.

  The two main Jane Austen Societies, the original British-based one and ‘JASNA’, the Jane Austen Society of North America (founded in 1975, and now by far the biggest), have provided useful neutral zones which can be shared by fans, readers and academics alike. Both the main societies feature lectures by leading scholars at their annual meetings and publish those papers and many other, unsolicited, contributions in professionally produced journals. JASNA has print and online versions of Persuasions, the Jane Austen Society of Australia (founded in 1988) publishes Sensibilities and the Jane Austen Society UK’s Collected Reports now runs to five volumes. The breadth of these resources is their great value, but the very lack of differentiation in them between kinds of Austen ‘knowledge’ makes some scholars feel queasy, as do the junketing aspects of the Society’s meetings, and the unsophisticated pleasure many members take in Austen-themed readings, costumed performances, teas, games and musical events; more pleasure perhaps than in the learned discourses which are meant to be the main event. Claudia Johnson has written amusingly of how badly Austen scholars do at JASNA quizzes (‘we rarely recollect the colour of this character’s dress or that servant’s name’) and how the boundaries between ‘interest’ and ‘scholarly interest’ get blurred:

  We sometimes suffer the additional mortification of discovering our own papers becoming yet another relatively undifferentiated, unhierarchicalized item in the great repository of Austeniana assiduously collected by Janeites and compiled in newsletters and reports, printed somewhere between recipes for white soup and the latest word jumble.74

  But Johnson acknowledges how self-serving the academic industry around Austen can be and how ‘some of our most basic assumptions about how to read her novels were calculated to consolidate the authority of a new professorate, with its distinctive programme and concomitant visions of class, gender, and national identity’.75 The academy’s generation of texts, theories and whole careers from one of the smallest oeuvres in the canon has indeed been phenomenal. Thirty or so years ago, it was still small enough to be parodied by David Lodge in his novel Changing Places, where Austen is the monolithic uber-subject chosen by Professor Morris Zapp as the target for his scholarly attention. Zapp’s project, already some years advanced, is to work through the whole Austen canon, ‘saying absolutely everything that could possibly be said’, with a view to closing the subject down:

  The idea was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle, historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, Christian-allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it; so that when each commentary was written there would be simply nothing further to say about the novel in question. The object of the exercise, as he had often to explain with as much patience as he could muster, was not to enhance others’ enjoyment and understanding of Jane Austen, still less to honour the novelist herself, but to put a definitive stop to the production of any further garbage on the subject. The commentaries would not be designed for the general reader but for the specialist, who, looking up Zapp, would find that the book, article or thesis he had been planning had already been anticipated and, more likely than not, invalidated. After Zapp, the rest would be silence. The thought gave him deep satisfaction. In Faustian moments he dreamed of going on, after fixi
ng Jane Austen, to do the same job on the other major English novelists, then the poets and the dramatists, perhaps using computers and teams of trained graduate students, inexorably reducing the area of English literature available for free comment, spreading dismay through the whole industry, rendering scores of his colleagues redundant: periodicals would fall silent, famous English Departments be left deserted like ghost towns.76

  Lodge’s wonderful satire acknowledges a fear of proliferation; in criticism, as in life, in the 1970s, everything seemed to be getting out of hand. But the computers Zapp imagined would help him eliminate Jane Austen have rather multiplied his problem, and the technological and cultural changes of the last thirty years have tended to embrace proliferation, encourage inclusiveness and render all sorts of ‘discrimination’ invalid. Zapp’s worst nightmares have come true: nowadays, a glance along the ‘A’ shelf of any good bookshop will reveal a dizzying array of books on Jane Austen: study guides, biographies, sourcebooks, companions, books on Jane Austen and the theatre, Jane Austen and food, and religion, and money, and the Romantic poets … Jane Austen on film, in a social context, as a parson’s daughter, as a sailor’s sister, the Historical Jane Austen, the Postcolonial Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Style. There is a whole book about the famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice77– which of course reaches no conclusion about its meaning. All this in addition to the novels themselves; the letters, the juvenilia, the chronology, the bibliographies, the facsimiles. It’s a vast industry to have arisen from a writer once thought of as an instinctive warbler about whom there was nothing to say, whose works, Anne Thackeray believed, resembled ‘the nest which some little bird builds of the materials nearest at hand … curiously constructed out of the simplest matters’.