Notes - Chapter 6: Canon and Canonisation
1. CH, vol. 2, p. 190.
2. ibid., p. 193.
3. Gilson, M84, p. 486.
4. Daily Telegraph, 18 July 1917.
5. James, p. 167.
6. CH, vol. 2, p. 290.
7. ibid., p. 174.
8. Raleigh, p. 471.
9. James, p. 168.
10. Macaulay, p. 694.
11. CH, vol. 2, pp. 287–8.
12. ibid., p. 301.
13. Chapman (1953), p. 46.
14. CH, vol. 2, p. 97.
15. Woolf, p. 169.
16. Watt, p. 9.
17. Forster, p. 145.
18. ibid., pp. 154–5.
19. Lascelles (1961), p. 368.
20. National Portrait Gallery, RWC to Henry Hake, 26 October 1932.
21. ibid.
22. ibid., J. H. Hubback to Henry Hake, 13 October 1932.
23. Her cousin William Austen-Leigh, co-author of Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters: A Family Record, lived at ‘Hartfield’ in Roehampton.
24. National Portrait Gallery, RWC to Henry Hake, 26 October 1932.
25. ibid., 22 April 1948. The writer Patrick O’Connor owns another copy of the same silhouette, obviously of nineteenth-century manufacture. It seems possible that they are both remnants of a small-issue souvenir.
26. Chapman (1948), p. 214.
27. CR, vol. 2, p. 174.
28. Letters, pp. 42 and 77.
29. ibid., p. 24.
30. Dunaway, p. 128.
31. Huxley, p. 447.
32. Dunaway, pp. 138 and 154.
33. Linklater, p. 122.
34. Churchill, pp. 376–7, 20 December 1943.
35. CH, vol. 2, p. 196.
36. Viveash, p. 338.
37. Neagle, p. 146.
38. ibid., p. 148.
39. CR, vol. 1, p. 112.
40. ibid., p. 18.
41. ibid., p. ix.
42. ibid., vol. 2, p. 174.
43. He contributed to PMLA in 1930 and published an article on JA’s early reading public in Review of English Studies.
44. CR, vol. 2, p. 214.
45. ibid., vol. 1, p. 108.
46. Lascelles (1939), p.v.
47. Leavis (1948), p. 17.
48. Tribune, 28 May 1948.
49. Auden, pp. 83–4.
50. Gorer, pp. 203–4.
51. Watt, p. 170.
52. ibid., p. 167.
53. CH, vol. 2, p. 288.
54. Leavis (1968), vol. 2, p. 73.
55. ibid., p. 1.
56. Watt, p. 118.
57. ibid., p. 119.
58. Cecil (1948), p. 99.
59. Cecil (1978), pp. 10–11.
60. ibid., p. 13.
61. ibid., p. 8.
62. CR, vol. 4, p. 285.
63. ‘Jane and All That’, Coleman, p. 247.
64. CR, vol. 5, p. 205.
65. ibid., vol. 4, p. 170.
66. ibid.
67. Terry Eagleton, ‘Irony and commitment’, Stand, vol. xx, no. 3 (1978).
68. Gilbert and Gubar, pp. 154–5.
69. Johnson, p. xiv.
70. Poovey, p. 237.
71. Todd (2005), p. 105.
72. Watt, p. 136.
73. Castle, p. 130.
74. ‘Austen Cults and Cultures’, Copeland and McMaster, p. 223.
75. ibid., p. 213.
76. Lodge, p. 34.
77. Per Serritslev Petersen (ed.), On the First Sentence of Pride and Prejudice: A Critical Discussion of the Theory and Practice of Literary Interpretation (1979).
CHAPTER 7
Jane AustenTM
The late-Victorian cult of ‘Divine Jane’ persisted in the popular imagination (albeit in widely differing forms) despite the many radically revisionist views of Austen and the significance and meaning of her writing that were put forward in the twentieth century. A genuinely popular author as well as a great one, she has come to exist, more obviously than any other English writer, in several mutually exclusive spheres at once. What appears to one reader as a biting satire on eighteenth-century provincial life is read by another purely for its nostalgia value; the feminist message of, say, Pride and Prejudice translates as a paeon to sexual pragmatism and the virtues of the status quo, while the frustrations of the thwarted professional writer evident in Austen’s letters strike some as marks of a delightfully unworldly amateurism. She has truly become all things to all men.
Austen didn’t seem like an obvious candidate for mass popularity in the late nineteenth century, or the late twentieth, before the public was whipped into a frenzy by Austen-Leigh’s Memoir in the first instance and, in the second, a man in a wet shirt. As Margaret Oliphant observed, hers were not the kinds of books ‘which catch the popular fancy at once without pleasing the critic – a power sometimes possessed by very imperfect and unsatisfactory performances; neither do they belong to that highest class of all which takes every variety of imagination by storm, and steps into favour without any probation’:
They are rather of the class which attracts the connoisseur, which charms the critical and literary mind, and which, by dint of persistency and iteration, is carried by the superior rank of readers into a half-real half-fictitious universality of applause …. ‘The best judges’ have here, for once, done the office of an Academy, and laureated a writer whom the populace would not have been likely to laureate, but whom it has learned to recognize.1
The public ‘learns to recognize’ literary qualities, Mrs Oliphant implies, which it is not able or inclined to appreciate through mere reading, and does so through the ‘persistency and iteration’ of the opinion-forming class.
Austen’s current success as a brand, or product, the name of which accrues interest from circulation alone, is a measure of ‘that ideological surplus value known as “legitimacy” or “authority”’ that Linda Charnes has found in all ‘notorious’ names.2 A strong myth or ‘product legend’ like hers depends upon separation from its origins; to quote Charnes again, it requires ‘the naturalizing or “forgetting” of its own history’ (a process which began for Austen even before her history was written). An opinion formed by a small group can in this way spread out and be held by a much larger group; its ‘half-real, half-fictitious’ quality becomes not just the way it disseminates effectively, but the reason it does.
As Mrs Oliphant said, Austen’s novels are neither trash nor works of blinding genius, but lie somewhere – one could say everywhere – in between. An American reviewer in 1844 identified Austen’s middlingness as the key to her effect, even at that early date: ‘Miss Austen – dear Miss Austen who never says a brilliant thing, nor paints a perfect character, – who is neither witty, nor passionate, nor eloquent, and is still minute, homelike, and true; and by these qualities alone, she twines about the inmost fibres of her readers’ hearts.’3 The middle-aged, the middle class and those who consider themselves slightly above the middlebrow are Austen’s natural constituency. They (we!) love Austen – the idea as much as the books – because she comes from our own ranks and rocks no boats. With Austen, we know that we are never going to be taken to extremes.
Austen’s narrowness has paradoxically been a major factor in her global mobility. Before the war, she was published in about a dozen languages, but in the following thirty years (propelled by film and other new media) she was translated into Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Icelandic, Russian, Persian, Polish, Serbo-Croat, Bengali, Finnish, Chinese, Arabic, Hungarian, as well as many minor tongues such as Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. The ‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village’ formula, in plots dealing almost exclusively with money and marriage, speaks to millions the world over. As David Cecil wrote in 1948, ‘Emma is universal just because it is narrow.’4 The most empathetic readers of Austen may well be in modern-day Africa, where the Church of England is at its most traditional, and where family structures still resemble those familiar to the author. An article in the Jane Aus
ten Society Report for 1962 showed that the pupils of a school in Nigeria had no trouble understanding the marital imperatives of Pride and Prejudice and the disposal problems connected with having five daughters.5 Bride and Prejudice, Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 Bollywood adaptation of the story, tapped into the same relevance to contemporary Sikhs – a relevance lost to contemporary Westerners.
It seems almost redundant to itemise aspects of Austen’s appeal; there are the brilliantly constructed plots, the romance, the comedy, the pellucid language. She is one of the most accessible intellectuals among authors and the least didactic moralist. The interest of her books is ‘far more serious than their surface appearance would lead us to expect’, as David Cecil said, rather ominously, but even the surface is entertainment enough. And there doesn’t have to be a war on for the escapist element to appeal: ‘What a relief it is to come back to your witty volumes,’ Andrew Lang exclaimed in 1884, ‘and forget the follies of today in those of Mr Collins and Mrs Bennet!’6 As G. K. Chesterton’s clerihew has it, ‘The Novels of Jane Austen/Are the ones to get lost in.’7
But the main reason for Austen’s mass popularity is the one from which critics tend to avert their eyes: the love stories. The Mills-and-Boon formula of girl meets boy, both meet obstacles but come together triumphantly in the end owes its neatness and directness to Austen and her streamlining of the romance plot she inherited. Just as great comedians have superb comic timing, Austen had an unerring instinct about where to place the romantic stimuli in her plots. It is especially effective in Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, both of which keep readers in a delicious state of anxiety and expectation right up to the clinching proposal moments, regardless of how often you read the books. (The cinema trailer for the 1995 BBC film of Persuasion voiced-over: ‘The critics call PERSUASION “A Cinderella romance so delicious you want it never to end”.’) Emma is more cryptic in its progress, though ultimately most satisfying in its outcome. The hero and heroine are not so clearly made for each other as in the other two books, and Emma’s realisation that she is in love comes late on, delayed by the narrative viewpoint being almost exclusively her own. But when Knightley proposes, Austen writes a template for thousands of subsequent love scenes:
‘My dearest Emma,’ said he, ‘for dearest you will always be, whatever the event of this hour’s conversation, my dearest, most beloved Emma – tell me at once. Say “No,” if it is to be said.’ – She could really say nothing. – ‘You are silent’, he cried, with great animation; ‘absolutely silent! at present I ask no more.’
Emma was almost ready to sink under the agitation of this moment. The dread of being awakened from the happiest dream, was perhaps the most prominent feeling.8
As Katherine Mansfield remarked with a sigh, ‘Mr Knightley in the shrubbery would be something!’9
More than half of all paperbacks published in 2004 were romances and Jane Austen is the acknowledged mother of the genre, many of which, like the works of Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland, return to Regency settings to get closer to their model. When the American imprint Silhouette Romances was being planned in the 1970s, everything in them was written to a formula developed by market research: even the name of the series (perhaps subconsciously evoking Austen) came from a consumer survey result. A group of women readers were asked what the ideal attributes of a romantic novel were, from the age of the heroine to the overall length of the book. The resulting tip sheet for writers could just as easily be applied to Austen’s novels: the heroines were always to be ‘young and virginal’, the heroes ‘strong and assertive’, the plots utterly predictable and the endings happy. There was to be no violence, blood or pain; no slang language or obscenity and no pre-marital sex. The heroine’s age should be between nineteen and twenty-seven, and she should not be ‘beautiful in the high fashion sense’. The hero should be eight to twelve years older than the heroine, ‘not necessarily handsome’, but virile and not married, though he could be bereaved, or divorced – as long as that wasn’t his fault.10 Austen’s novels clearly contributed to this formula as well as shared the basic instincts behind it.
There are, of course, no raised heart rates, no touching and certainly no kisses in any of Austen’s novels, none of the thinly veiled or not-veiled-at-all orgasmic prose of the Gothic novelists that Austen herself enjoyed as rollicking good reads, not to mention the prurience that her literary hero Samuel Richardson indulged on his way to a moral. But the very absence of explicit eroticism leaves her books charged with sexual feeling, mostly of the young, virginal (therefore rather sex-obsessed) heroines, though the male characters’ feelings are indicated too, through restlessness (Frank Churchill), meaningful looks (Wentworth) and agitated silences (Mr Knightley). George Moore had noted in 1919 ‘that it was Miss Austen’s spinsterhood that allowed her to discover the Venusberg in the modern drawing-room’.11 Her effectiveness in this regard seems only to increase with time. In a permissive age, the restraint and decorousness of her love scenes seem in themselves erotic and the idea of the heroines attracting so much male attention by making so few sexual concessions becomes, for the modern woman, an unattainable fantasy of female empowerment.
Contemporary ‘chick-lit’ follows Austen rather more closely than the Mills-and-Boon-style romance in its preference for pliable male characters, lovers for the heroines who promise to be helpmates rather than dominators. Austen’s heroes (or men – for they aren’t in truth very heroic) can be adapted easily to this model. They have often been complained of for being rather two-dimensional creatures: even the manly ones, such as Captain Wentworth and Colonel Brandon, are shown in retirement or furlough; Darcy is too gentlemanly to be caught in the act of manliness, Edward Ferrars and Edmund Bertram are both young and pious and Henry Tilney is downright girly, with his knowledge of muslins and chat about books. Such men are so non-threatening that a conscientious screenwriter such as Andrew Davies has felt it necessary to introduce scenes of ‘manly pursuits’ in his adaptations, to inject into his scripts some of the testosterone that Austen always left out. In Davies’s Sense and Sensibility (2007), Brandon does some shooting and falconry, Edward Ferrars swings his axe at the firewood and they all gallop around furiously on steaming stallions when suffering from the disappointments of Austen’s delayed-gratification plots.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the people who find Austen’s treatment of sex and romance unconvincing tend to be men. A critic in 1924 complained that there was ‘no sex at all’ in her work: ‘[she] is the feminine Peter Pan of letters …. In her world there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage but just the make-believe mating of dolls.’12 Walter Raleigh, otherwise a great admirer of the novels, found the inferior vitality of the male characters completely laughable. ‘Her young men, my Gawd!’ he wrote to R. W. Chapman in 1926. ‘I will only take Darcy and Bingley. Of course they have no profession – they have money. But there is no scrap of evidence, no indication, that they can do anything, shoot a partridge, or add up figures, or swim or brush their hair. They never talk about anything except young women, a subject taboo among decent young men. (I find that women mostly don’t know that men never talk intimately about them. Jane didn’t know this.) Well, Darcy and Bingley have only one interest in life – getting married, and marrying their friends one to another. It is incredible, immense, yet it deludes you while you read.’13 G. K. Chesterton tried to defend Austen’s understanding of male psychology, even if her knowledge of male physicality seems a little limited. ‘[When Darcy says] “I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory” … he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than was ever hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontës’ heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot’s.’14 But most male commentators agreed with Raleigh that Austen only ‘knew what she didn’t know’ about sex, and remained ‘concealed behind a fogbank of bourgeois morality’ as Marvin Mudrick remarked, ‘routed by the sexual question she has raised’.15
Wayne Bo
oth in 1961 tried to reclaim Austen for normality (specifically, heterosexuality) by asserting that the author had no need to introduce actual ‘love scenes’ into her novels, because all that a love scene would encompass was already encoded in (or on) the text, and didn’t need to be made explicit. And it is true that Austen does suggest a world of other thoughts in the slow, appreciative way that Emma suddenly ‘sees’ Knightley at the Crown ball:
There he was, among the standers-by, where he ought not to be; he ought to be dancing, … so young as he looked! – He could not have appeared to greater advantage perhaps any where, than where he had placed himself. His tall, firm, upright figure, among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders of the elderly men, was such as Emma felt must draw every body’s eyes.16
Elizabeth Bennet indulges some similarly proprietary gazing in front of Darcy’s portrait in the gallery at Pemberley. The fact that the subject is captured in oils makes him fair game for her imagination:
At last it arrested her – and she beheld a striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy, with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her …. as she stood before the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression.17
The wild success of recent Austen films relies in great part on their visual realisation of the erotic potential of the novels, on the dramatisation of scandalous elements locked into some of Austen’s backstories and on the vision, generously lingered over by the camera, of a lot of handsome men in the flattering dress of the early 1800s. Several amateur compilations on YouTube cleverly rework the romantic highlights of the films: Jane Austen Ladies to Nellie Furtado’s ‘Maneater’; Juicy Period Drama Men by ‘Elbenhexe’ (to Better Than Ezra’s ‘Juicy’) and Period Drama Montage by ‘DreamyViper’. This last, setting clips of assorted hunks from recent TV and film adaptations (most of them Austen books) to The Weather Girls’ ‘It’s Raining Men’, begins hilariously with JJ Feild, a charmingly twinkly Henry Tilney, saying to Catherine Morland, ‘I fear we may be about to get a little damp.’
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